Lead Software Engineer, Skiller Whale

• We think an ideal fit for this role would be an experienced senior or lead software engineer who likes moving at speed, seeing the impact of their work, and thrives in an environment of high ownership and autonomy
• 5+ years of experience building, maintaining and securing web applications, with at least some work on infrastructure, databases, backend and frontend
• 3+ years (and a high level of comfort) working with Ruby on Rails in a commercial team
• Experience building and maintaining cloud infrastructure (ideally using AWS and Terraform)
• Strong written and verbal communication skills (fluent English)
• Comfort in a fast moving environment, where priorities can sometimes change quickly - ideally in a startup or scale-up
• For the most part, we expect you'll be able to fill knowledge gaps with specific tools, as long as you've had relevant experience
• So don't worry if you've used GCP more than AWS, or CloudFormation instead of Terraform - we'd expect your understanding of the concepts to enable you to learn quickly
• However, we feel that Rails is quite specific, and therefore a hard requirement since most of our backend code is written in Rails and we need you to be able to hit the ground running

Desirable

• We're looking for a lead software engineer to own the development of Skiller Whale's web application, through which we manage and deliver live workshops to help software engineers grow
• You'll be working closely with the CTO (that's me) to architect the system, maintain and build our platform, solve problems and help us to provide excellent learning to as many people as we can
• We're not looking for someone to just pick tickets off a feature board and implement them
• We want somebody who seeks to understand enough context to highlight risks, suggest alternative solutions, come up with exciting ideas and then make them reality
• You'll have a high degree of trust and autonomy, and need to be comfortable having responsibility for the application
• We have a tight-knit core team of 10 people (6 of whom are software engineers), and a much larger community of senior and lead engineers who coach our sessions for a few hours each week
• Your time will be mostly dedicated to planning and building software, rather than people or project management, although you will be interacting regularly with people in other parts of the business to understand their problems and help come up with solutions
• You'll be the only person working full time on the application codebase, but strong engineering practices are core to our company culture, and you would not be working in isolation
• You can expect daily standups, regular planning meetings and our production code all goes through PR review with the CTO or one of the Curriculum Team (who are all senior software / data engineers)
• Designing and building system architecture in the cloud (previous projects have included custom online environments for learners to write and run code, a websocket -> sse proxy to get around firewalls that block websocket traffic, and a system to manage allocation of AWS accounts to learners so they are available for their sessions)
• Planning and developing new app features, (e.g. allowing break-out video conferencing groups within our coaching sessions, live-shared drawing whiteboards, smart-scheduling). You'll be given a lot of trust to make decisions, but with the support of the CTO
• Improving our build, testing and deployment processes
• Fixing bugs, improving app performance etc
• Collaborating with our CTO on the engineering side of our product roadmap, helping to define requirements and come up with creative solutions to business problems
• Whilst the company is small, we’d also love you to be involved in the development of our teaching material if this interests you
• This could be coming up with interesting and realistic code exercises / demo apps, writing clear explanations, or even leading some workshops depending on your skills and preferences