Staff Software Engineer, Run-Time Infrastructure - Slack id-9433

May 24, 2025

To get the best candidate experience, please consider applying for a maximum of 3 roles within 12 months to ensure you are not duplicating efforts.

Job Category

Software Engineering

Job Details

About Salesforce

We're Salesforce, the Customer Company, inspiring the future of business with AI+ Data +CRM. Leading with our core values, we help companies across every industry blaze new trails and connect with customers in a whole new way. And, we empower you to be a Trailblazer, too - driving your performance and career growth, charting new paths, and improving the state of the world. If you believe in business as the greatest platform for change and in c

Other Jobs You May Be Interested In

Slack enables people all over the world to communicate and collaborate together. Teams of all scales - from the world's largest public companies to the smallest of startups - use Slack to get work done, so we take performance and reliability very seriously.

A taste of our scale:

• The average user spends over 10 hours connected and 2.5 hours active in Slack every single day

• 1.5 billion+ messages are sent per month, half of those outside the United States

• Every day we see over 10M+ daily active users, over a billion web requests, and 10s of billions of database queries.

• We handle about 600k requests per second, summing up the entire day gets us at about 6 billion API requests served per day.

• For millions of people, Slack is the primary communication tool they use at work all day long. They expect it to be exceptionally reliable and fast, all the time.

About the team:

WebApp Infra (WIN) pillar provides the tools to make it possible for hundreds of developers to develop in a multi million line codebase with safety and productivity at the forefront. WIN handles maintenance and upgrades of the Hack programming language, static analysis tooling, widely used libraries in the codebase, asynchronous job queue, as well as tuning and debugging the HHVM runtime and other services it depends on. With four sub-teams : Language, Runtime, Reliability aka WIRE and asynchronous services (AServ), webapp infra team supports the middle layers of the stack above the AWS instances and below the product code. This role is open for the Runtime sub-team.

The WebApp Infra Runtime team is a small team making a large impact. We are responsible for Slack's deployment of HHVM, the virtual machine that runs the Hack programming language that Slack's Webapp backend is written in. We work with product teams to build Hack client libraries and C++ extensions to add more capabilities to WebApp. We fix bugs in HHVM and improve performance across the whole platform. Small improvements can make a big difference: every request that Slack's backend serves runs on systems we support.

Back to blog

Common Interview Questions And Answers

1. HOW DO YOU PLAN YOUR DAY?

This is what this question poses: When do you focus and start working seriously? What are the hours you work optimally? Are you a night owl? A morning bird? Remote teams can be made up of people working on different shifts and around the world, so you won't necessarily be stuck in the 9-5 schedule if it's not for you...

2. HOW DO YOU USE THE DIFFERENT COMMUNICATION TOOLS IN DIFFERENT SITUATIONS?

When you're working on a remote team, there's no way to chat in the hallway between meetings or catch up on the latest project during an office carpool. Therefore, virtual communication will be absolutely essential to get your work done...

3. WHAT IS "WORKING REMOTE" REALLY FOR YOU?

Many people want to work remotely because of the flexibility it allows. You can work anywhere and at any time of the day...

4. WHAT DO YOU NEED IN YOUR PHYSICAL WORKSPACE TO SUCCEED IN YOUR WORK?

With this question, companies are looking to see what equipment they may need to provide you with and to verify how aware you are of what remote working could mean for you physically and logistically...

5. HOW DO YOU PROCESS INFORMATION?

Several years ago, I was working in a team to plan a big event. My supervisor made us all work as a team before the big day. One of our activities has been to find out how each of us processes information...

6. HOW DO YOU MANAGE THE CALENDAR AND THE PROGRAM? WHICH APPLICATIONS / SYSTEM DO YOU USE?

Or you may receive even more specific questions, such as: What's on your calendar? Do you plan blocks of time to do certain types of work? Do you have an open calendar that everyone can see?...

7. HOW DO YOU ORGANIZE FILES, LINKS, AND TABS ON YOUR COMPUTER?

Just like your schedule, how you track files and other information is very important. After all, everything is digital!...

8. HOW TO PRIORITIZE WORK?

The day I watched Marie Forleo's film separating the important from the urgent, my life changed. Not all remote jobs start fast, but most of them are...

9. HOW DO YOU PREPARE FOR A MEETING AND PREPARE A MEETING? WHAT DO YOU SEE HAPPENING DURING THE MEETING?

Just as communication is essential when working remotely, so is organization. Because you won't have those opportunities in the elevator or a casual conversation in the lunchroom, you should take advantage of the little time you have in a video or phone conference...

10. HOW DO YOU USE TECHNOLOGY ON A DAILY BASIS, IN YOUR WORK AND FOR YOUR PLEASURE?

This is a great question because it shows your comfort level with technology, which is very important for a remote worker because you will be working with technology over time...

DISCLAIMER