Remote Senior Application Engineer (Node.js)
Float
Float is the world’s leading software for teams to plan their time and, behind it, is a world-class team looking for a Senior Application Engineer with deep Node.js experience to join us. From New York to the UK, Canada to South Africa—our Engineering, Product, Marketing, Insights, Design and Customer Success teams work asynchronously, helping brands such as Airbnb, Buzzfeed, and Ogilvy plan and manage their time better. Float is self-funded, profitable, and growing. If you’re a go-getter, align with our values, and are looking to join a team that’s passionate about helping others work and live more productively, we want to hear from you. Here are a few tips from our CEO to make sure your resume stands out from the crowd.
Why We’re Hiring For This Role
As our team and customer base continues to grow, an opportunity has arisen to join our team to help expand and maintain our back-end services.
We’ve recently hired a new Product Manager to focus on third-party integrations and mobile apps. To partner this new role, we welcomed a new mobile engineer and we are now looking for an experienced back-end engineer to form a key part of this growing and increasingly important team.
In order to meet the increasing demands of our growing customer base and larger customers, we are in the early stages of considering what the next evolution of our back-end systems should be. You’ll be on the front-line in these discussions, evaluating any necessary trade-offs and figuring out how our current systems can adapt to whatever new architecture we adopt.
Our Director of Engineering, Colin, explains the important role you will play within our Engineering team. Watch this video.
You’ll be working asynchronously with a bright, dedicated team from across the globe, with a strong focus on taking complex problems and creating solutions that feel simple and intuitive for our customers.
What You’ll Be Responsible For
As an Engineer within our Applications Division, you’ll be maintaining and developing features that help power over 4,000 customers using our product. You’ll be working to ensure the reliability of these services, implementing new features to take them to the next level as well as being involved in the discussions and practicalities of scaling our back-end systems to support an ever-growing customer base as well as ever-growing individual customers themselves.
You’ll be joining a small squad of engineers taking ownership of our ‘added value’ services - those that are not the core components of our product but those that provide the stickiness that allows customers to use Float to the fullest extent and meld well with other existing processes and systems they make use of. Examples are our integrations with a number of third-party task management tools such as Jira, Xero, WorkflowMax & Asana as well as a number of calendar tools such as Google Calendar and Microsoft Outlook.
In the immediate future, you’ll become familiar with the systems and services in this area by helping to investigate and resolve incoming customer issues. The aim here is to both have a satisfied customer but also to ensure that no future customer has to feel this same pain in the future. You’ll likely be digging deep into the code while also cleaning up any data issues that arise in order to ‘wow’ our customers and put a smile on their faces.
Longer-term, you’ll be a key part of our future architecture changes over the coming quarters as we pivot to a more scalable framework to allow us to continue to grow and to support our customers as they continue to grow themselves. There will be opportunity to modify and re-write many of our existing services to make them both more performant and also more modular so that they are all able to communicate effectively with each other while still evolving independently.
What You’ll Need To Be Successful
You’ll come to Float with a thorough familiarity of Node.js and have worked with production services written in JavaScript or TypeScript. You’ll certainly be familiar with messaging architectures, and likely have used RabbitMQ & Redis or similar to support scalable, reliable message delivery.
We’d expect the successful candidate to display most if not all of the following:
- Expert Node.js proficiency in a production environment
- Expert proficiency with relational databases (MySQL) and optimizing SQL queries
- Extensive experience with microservices-based architecture in production
- Proficiency with message queuing systems (RabbitMQ, Pub/Sub)
- Experience with serverless architecture (Cloud Run and App Engine in particular)
- Experience developing integrations with third-party APIs
It would be a bonus if you have:
- Experience developing data processing pipelines (Dataflow, BigQuery, Cloud PubSub, PubSub Lite)
- Experience with event streaming systems (Kafka and similar)
You should be comfortable working autonomously while recognizing the limits of your own skills and knowledge. An ability to communicate clearly and with clarity, particularly in written communication is vital to success in this role since our Engineering team and beyond are spread across the world and we rely on accurate written documentation to maintain our lines of communication.
Being product-focused but also customer-focused, you care about the end-user experience and aren’t afraid to speak up to fellow engineers as well as designers and product managers about areas we could do better. You balance that with pragmatism, understanding that sometimes a non-optimal solution is better now than a perfect solution at some unknown time in the future.
If you have experience with the likes of Kafka or similar stream processing solutions, we’d love to hear from you in particular. Our data and services feel very amenable to this kind of an approach and it is one we are in the process of evaluating for future adoption.
As a fully remote team, we’re looking for someone comfortable with asynchronous communication as the default, which means you have previous remote experience and are comfortable using tools like Slack, Loom, and Asana to communicate as needed. Don’t worry—you will have significant deep work time since we have very few meetings.
Why Join Us
We’re a global company with a diverse team of folks from all over the world who share a common belief in living our best work life. That includes a flexible asynchronous policy that allows you to work whenever you work best, minimal meetings, annual team meetups, and perks and benefits that support your personal health and well-being.
Our growing range of perks and benefits include:
- Home office expense budget
- Co-working expense budget
- Health & fitness budget
- Annual team meetup
- Care for your community donation or leave
We understand that you probably want to learn a bit more about us as well, so here are some resources to get a sense of who we are and how we work:
The salary for this role is US $140,505 (Level 3). Here’s a blog post with more information on how we determine our salaries.
Note: Industry research shows that women and those in traditionally underrepresented groups generally don’t apply to jobs unless they check all the boxes for the role. If you feel strongly that you have what it takes for this role but don’t check 100% of the boxes—that’s okay—we encourage you to apply anyway and highlight what you can bring to the table.
Hiring Process For This Role
You’ll find a lot of useful information about our interview process and what it’s like to join our global team on the Float careers page. The hiring process for this role looks like this:
- Initial First Meeting: If your application is shortlisted, you will have a 15-minute meeting with Linda from Talent. This meeting gives us an opportunity to learn more about your experience and also allows you to ask any questions you have about the role.
- Technical Interview: You’ll meet with members of our Engineering team for a technical interview. This generally includes reviewing a 45-minute exercise that will take a deep dive into your technical skills and experience.
- Manager Interview: As the final step in the process, you’ll meet with Colin, the Director of Engineering and the hiring manager for this role for a 30-minute interview.
Our hiring process takes an average of 25 days from the first interview to a job offer (based on 2021 data). Linda from Talent will be in touch each step of the way to ensure that you are well informed and aware of the next step in the process.
Unfortunately, due to the high volume of applications, we can only contact candidates who have been shortlisted for the role. If you do not hear from us within 14 days of submitting your application, we encourage you to apply for another role in the future.
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