[Hiring] Senior Backend Engineer @Spotted Zebra

We are on a quest for extraordinary individuals who are mission driven and aspire to create a profound and positive impact in the world by addressing the skills crisis. Our dazzle of zebras is a force to be reckoned with - they possess unwavering determination, take decisive action, push boundaries with innovative ideas, and thrive in an environment that offers autonomy, trust, and accountability to deliver exceptional outcomes.

 

The skills crisis is a colossal challenge, one that is expected to have a greater economic impact than the COVID-19 pandemic. The shortage of skilled workers is leaving millions of positions unfilled, and this crisis has been deemed by the World Economic Forum as one of the biggest challenges of our time, second only to climate change.

 

The world’s largest companies are transforming into skills-based organisations to survive, but most are struggling to do so without the proper tools. That's where we come in - we have built an innovative platform for workforce management that empowers companies to make skill-based decisions and thrive.

 

Our existing clients have already witnessed the positive impact that skill-based decision-making has on organisational performance, diversity, culture, and management insight. We are a profitable business with several FTSE100 customers and have recently secured funding from a top European VC fund.

 

We are now assembling the right team to help us become the leader in the multi-billion dollar skill-based workforce planning market. Our mission is clear and ambitious - by 2033, we will be recognised as the most crucial HR system for the world’s largest companies. In doing so, we will be driving a quarter of all people-decisions and will be making a significant contribution towards solving the skills crisis. We’d love you to join us and make a difference that will shape the future for generations to come!

 

We’re searching for someone to join our engineering team as a Senior Backend Engineer. Your biggest challenge, working alongside our other Engineers, will be to take both an individual contributor and leadership role in the continued design and build of our core Skills Cloud and the workforce and HR applications that sits on top of it. Our focus is on implementing an architecture that breaks down dependencies to allow for multiple innovative and decoupled engineering teams to deliver applications at high velocity.

 

The engineering team will be growing by 3x over the next 12 months so we are looking for senior engineers that can come in now and quickly develop to a team leadership role to support that growth and have ownership over one or more microservice. The role will have a high degree of direct coding and will also involve you in software architecture discussions.

 

You’ll be a senior member of our engineering function, you'll help us build a market-leading product and will:

• Collaborate with your senior colleagues in Engineering, Data Science, QC and DevOps to help create the team structures, processes and policies to support our goals.
• Contribute great ideas and solutions to our Customer’s problems. You’ll be highly engaged with the Product Team, both contributing your ideas and helping develop your colleagues’ ideas.
• Deliver winning solutions. During ideation you’ll assist with prototyping, identify key technical risks and assist the team in validating (or invalidating) ideas quickly and accurately. You’ll understand the problem clearly and the requirements of the validated idea for delivery.
• Exceed customer’s expectations. Having been part of the problem definition, you’ll own the outcome and focus on solving the problem and exceeding expectations rather than simply delivering features.
• Maximise velocity. You’ll be empowered to ensure you and the team are geared to deliver continuously with high velocity. You’ll knock down barriers which slow you and the team down, including minimising technical debt and internal dependencies.
• Spend most of your time Making not Supporting. You will likely have ownership over one or more microservices. You’ll get to focus on Making by delivering reliable, clean and efficient code and by automating testing.
• Make lifelong colleagues. You’ll have the opportunity to mentor junior members of the team but also the option to focus as an individual highly skilled contributor. Either way, you’ll bring the best out in others, support them, challenge them and laugh with them and as a result you’ll make some life long friends and colleagues.

Requirements

• Spent the majority of your career as a backend engineer. You have excellent experience of NodeJS, Typescript, Postgres and ideally GraphQL. You may have instead spent a significant amount of time as a Java engineer but have at least one year’s exposure to NodeJS.
• Exposure to SaaS a business that has scaled across several products or modules, ideally with a common platform to deliver ‘consumer grade’ products.
• Understanding of OOP/OOD.
• Microservice infrastructure in a high availability environment.
• Worked in and helped scale engineering teams in excess of 10 individuals.
• Been part of a team that has implemented CI/CD.

 

On the Frontend:

• ReactJS with Typescript
• Bit.dev with storyboard
• Jest
• Cypress
• GraphQL

On the Backend:

• Microservice infra
• NodeJS on NestJS with Typescript
• RabbitMQ
• Postgres
• Jest

Other:

• Github
• Github actions
• Gitpod
• Jira
• Notion
• Miro
• Zeplin
• Heroku / AWS

Benefits

• Working directly with the founders and Head of Engineering, this is a great opportunity for personal development in a fast paced and supportive environment.
• Ownership: You’ll own a piece of Spotted Zebra through our option scheme. With VC funding we are aiming high and want you to share in that success.
• 20 days holiday, your own national holidays, monthly socials and much more to come!
• Remote work environment.
• More perks as we (and you) think of them!