Staff Software Engineer

Job Description

We are opening a Staff Software Engineer position with a cross-squad scope. It is a senior individual contributor role, reporting directly to the Head of Engineering.

Your impact will be measured by how much the whole engineering team improves with you in it: the quality of our architecture, the speed at which squads deliver, and the technical level of the engineers around you. Together with our other Staff Engineers, you will shape the technical direction of our three squads, lead the technical initiatives no single squad can own, help teams with their hardest problems, and keep writing code. This is a job for someone who still likes to build.

Our Tech Department?

Our stack

• Ruby on Rails monolith

• Micro-services in Go, Ruby

• Postgres, MySQL and Redis

• ElasticSearch or Algolia, depending on our use case.

• gRPC

• Kafka

• React, TypeScript, Next.js, React testing library and Storybook

• AWS hosting, Kubernetes, monitored with Grafana.

• Continuous deployment with Github & CircleCI 

Our organization (the famous “Spotify model” adapted so differently by each company)

• 60 people (engineers, product people and data team)

• 1 product engineering tribe with 3 impact teams and 3 Staff Engineers

• 1 platform tribe including a QA team, a core engineering team, a devops & SRE team

• Each team with a hands-on Engineering Manager

• Staff Engineers report directly to the Head of Engineering

• Software craftsmanship: clean code, testing, peer programming, code review, etc.

What you will do

Architecture and technical direction across squads

• With the other Staff Engineers, you define and maintain the target architecture of the platform and turn it into a technical roadmap that squads follow because it is clear and practical.

• You anticipate the technical problems the product will hit in the next 6 to 12 months and make the design decisions that avoid them.

• You frame the most complex and ambiguous technical topics at the system level (data models, service boundaries, event flows, integrations with external tools) and bring them to a decision.

• You make trade-offs explicit for Product and Engineering leadership: what a pattern brings versus what it costs, what we build now versus what we defer.

Hands-on technical leadership

• You write code on the critical and transverse pieces: shared libraries, core services, migrations, performance and reliability work that spans squads.

• You know large sections of the codebase in depth, and you are the person squads call when they are stuck on a hard problem or a production incident.

• You set the example on testing, observability and deployment practices, and you make good practice the easy default rather than a rule to enforce.

• You remove complexity wherever you find it: fewer moving parts, fewer ways of doing the same thing, less work for the same outcome.

Growing the engineering team

• You mentor senior and mid-level engineers, and you help seniors become mentors themselves.

• Jointly with the chapter leads, you run the backend community: design reviews, tech talks, workshops, shared guidelines and documentation.

• You represent JobTeaser engineering outside the company, at meetups, in articles or in open source.

Working with engineering leadership

• You work with the Head of Engineering and the Engineering Managers to structure technical work, staff transverse initiatives and weigh technical investment against product needs.

• You help technical debates reach a decision, then communicate and support that decision once it is made.

• You pick up transverse topics that have no natural owner.

What will be your next challenges? 

• Consolidate our tech stack, practices and tooling across our microservice architecture into a cohesive technical vision

• Lead explorations and architectural design of complex new features and integrations with new tools

• Supervise the proper documentation of our architectural decisions and practices

• Participate in the animation of the community of backend and frontend developers 

• Guide improvements to our platform’s monitoring, alerting and reliability

• Mentor and assist other backend developers and teams on complex problems

Qualifications

Who are you? 🎯

• We care more about judgment and track record than about years of experience. As a reference point, you probably have 8 or more years in software engineering, including a substantial period in a transverse or lead role spanning several teams (Staff, Principal, Lead or equivalent) in a product company such as a SaaS, a marketplace or a platform.

• You have strong backend skills in Ruby or another backend ecosystem, and you are at ease with distributed systems, relational databases, Kafka, REST and gRPC APIs, and cloud infrastructure on AWS and Kubernetes.

• You have built and operated business-critical systems at scale, led a large migration or architectural transition across several teams, and can point to measurable improvements in stability, performance or scalability that you drove.

• You know when structure adds value and when it gets in the way. You prefer clear code to clever code, and you can say "not yet" as easily as "yes".

• You align engineers, managers and product people without hierarchical authority, and you are comfortable with disagreement when it leads to a better decision.

• You ask why before how, and you connect technical choices to what users and the business get out of them. You can help Product weigh a roadmap against its technical trade-offs.

• You explain complex things simply, in writing and in conversation, and you enjoy making other engineers better.

• You follow what LLMs and agents are changing in software engineering and in products, and you have already used them, for your own work or in something you shipped.

Additional Information

At JobTeaser, get ready to…

• 💚 Join a mission-driven company with a concrete impact on the new generation.
• 🌏 Share our three core virtues with our people all over Europe: #OneTeam, #Ownership, #Innovation.
• 🚀 Take part in a dynamic internal life, where everyone can contribute (all-hands, local parties, team drinks, team-buildings, etc.).
• 📚 Grow and develop your career with a strong training policy, including an annual individual budget for learning opportunities (95% of our employees were trained last year!).
• 🏡 Enjoy our flexible work environment: remote-friendly, with one month per year from anywhere in Europe, and home office equipment support. This position can even be fully remote.
• 👨‍👩‍👧‍👦 Benefit from our Family Care Policy: 4 additional paid days off during your return month from parental leave, 3 paid child-sick days per year, and other initiatives to support parents.
• 🧠 Take care of your mental health with Moka Care: 4 free therapy or coaching sessions per year (with additional support in challenging personal situations), plus regular workshops for managers in partnership with Moka Care and Alan.
• 🗣️ Make your voice count: our Take Care Survey (run twice a year) ensures employee feedback directly shapes JobTeaser’s culture, collaboration and cross-team work.
• ⏰ Protect your focus time with our No-Meeting Wednesday mornings initiative.
• 🤝 Collaborate closely with our CSE, actively involved in enhancing work life and benefits (with the HappyPal platform)
• 💸 Enjoy the essentials: RTT, health insurance, lunch vouchers, holiday bonus, and 50% public transport reimbursement.
• 🚆 A modern and well-located office at WeWork - including delicious barista coffee and free yoga lessons.
• 🤩 Be proud: 88% of our employees say they are proud to work in their team at JobTeaser (Internal Take Care Survey, November 2024).

Your hiring process and the next steps

In order to identify the perfect fit for us (and also for you!), we offer a comprehensive hiring process with the possibility to get to know all your future key team members, and between each step of your process, you will receive constructive feedback from our Talent team.

1. A 30-min screening call to get to know you better with Emilie, our Lead Technical Recruiter
2. A Technical interview with two Senior Engineers of the team to test your hard skills
3. An interview with your future manager to discuss about your experiences and motivations
4. A final round with your Department Head to confirm the mutual match
5. Welcome at JobTeaser 💚

We are committed to creating a working environment where everyone feels comfortable. We promote diversity within our teams and every application we receive is screened through a unique, pre-established, competency-based process.

Compensation: 75000 to 85000 (EUR) (YEARLY)