Staff Software Engineer, Happy Scribe
Product
€70-100k
+ Equity
React
AWS
Heroku
Ruby
Rails
Ruby on Rails
Senior and Expert level
Barcelona
More information about location
2-5 days a week in office
AI-powerred transcription and subtitling platform.
Open for applications
AI-powerred transcription and subtitling platform.
21-100 employees
B2CB2BArtificial IntelligenceLanguagesSaaSAutomation
Open for applications
€70-100k
+ Equity
React
AWS
Heroku
Ruby
Rails
Ruby on Rails
Senior and Expert level
Barcelona
More information about location
2-5 days a week in office
21-100 employees
B2CB2BArtificial IntelligenceLanguagesSaaSAutomation
Company mission
We are building the #1 Audiovisual Platform by combining AI with trusted language experts to produce high-quality transcriptions, subtitles, and closed captions at speed.
Role
Who you are
- You have a solid background as a Software Engineer and enjoy working in a Full Stack role, focusing approximately 70% on backend and 30% on frontend tasks
- You're product focused. You want to listen to customers, and build the product that will solve their needs
- You care about the business implications of anything you build. You don't go after the shiny stuff, but see it as a balance of craft, speed, and the bottom line
- You love steep learning curves, and are not afraid to learn about subjects that are outside of the comfort zone. For example, you can learn most technologies as you go. You're pragmatic about them, it's about the tools and tradeoffs, not ideologies
- You care about information security and design things with security in mind
- You are excited about our engineering principles. Or at least curious about them, if they seem very different from what you've been doing in the past
- You’re a great mentor, able to share your knowledge and upskill other team members. Bonus points if you have experience helping a junior engineer stretch their skills and learn fast
- We have a language-agnostic approach to code and believe the best engineers can code in any language. Our stack is in Ruby on Rails and React, but it's not a requirement that you know how to work with them. We like to work with people who are more interested in the problem they're solving than in the language they're using to solve it. We use Heroku for infrastructure and AWS as a cloud
What the job involves
- Build product features from start to finish. You'll wear many hats during the creation process while you conceive, design, implement, ship and maintain them — think features to improve the editing experience.
- Build the scalable infrastructure needed for the transcription of the future — like identifying coupling and extracting concerns into small and scalable services.
- Improve the performance, reliability, and efficiency of our systems — for example finding bottlenecks in the transcription pipeline and optimizing them to reduce overall turnaround time.
- Design and implement processes and internal tools with simplicity and productivity in mind — such as a tool to sync valuable user feedback with the internal database.
Application process
- Step 1 - TA Screening Call - 20-35 minute video call with our talent team to dive deeper into your skillset
- Step 2 - First Tech Interview. 60 minutes with a Senior Engineer from our team; we will focus on several key areas that are crucial for the Senior Software Engineer position
- Step 3 - Second Tech Interview. 60-90 minutes. Live coding interview with 2 of our engineers, focused on a real world problem you might actually need to solve at Happy Scribe. No take home exercises or preparation required
- Step 4 - Values and Meet The Team. 60 minutes with a co-founder and another team member followed by another 45 minutes to meet some of the amazing people you’d be working with to help you know if you want to join our team
Our take
Transcription and subtitling services are required in many different industries to support today’s international business landscape, and whilst this sounds simple, it is often difficult to find an effective solution. Whilst there are many transcription and subtitling services online, they are usually expensive when accurate, inaccurate when cheap, and lack the tools that companies need to apply them effectively.
Happy Scribe provides an AI-driven transcription and subtitling service online, allowing users to translate its automated services across over 60 languages, integrate and apply it through an interactive editing tool, and integrate it with APIs such as Youtube's closed captions. The company claims its automated AI-driven solution is up to 85% accurate, but users can pay for human-interrupted services to reach 99%+ accuracy.
Whilst Happy Scribe will inevitably face competition from existing transcription solutions, the company still shows a cutting edge by providing an end-to-end online workflow and deployment toolkit. Furthermore, by employing a workforce of translators and language experts, the company’s human-interrupted AI transcription solution goes beyond the language capabilities of existing services.
Kirsty
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Insights
Few candidates hear
back within 2 weeks
50% female employees
36% employee growth in 12 months
Company
Employee endorsements
Focus on employee wellbeing
"The co-founders truly care about the well-being of the team, from offering flexible working time, to unlimited vacation and even offering free..."
Company benefits
- ✨ Have an impact on millions of people — Change how users and language professionals make transcriptions, translations and subtitles
- 👫 Work with a small team of bright people — When we talk with most people, they have a hard time understanding how we got so far with so few people. We're close in ARR to a typical Series B company, but our ARR per employee is 10x the industry average
- 🤝 A company culture built on trust, autonomy, and independence
- 📈 Equity — By joining the company when the team is so small, you’re helping us set the foundations of our future success. We're asking you to come on an adventure, so if we find a treasure, we want you to get a piece
- 🧠 Mental health support — We have partnered with [Oliva](https://olivahealth.app/) to offer you the best mental health support, from day 1. You can access 1-1 online therapy as often as you need to and it’s 100% confidential
- ⏱️Flexible working hours — Work on the schedule that makes you the most happy and productive
- 🏖️ 30 days vacation time — So you can recharge your batteries whenever you need to, without having to count the days
- 🌏 €1,000 per year travel bonus — We live in a distributed world where most people have friends and family spread around the globe. We don’t want finances or distances to get in the way of spending time with the people you care about. This perk will help you stay closer to them
- 📚 1 book/mo + e-learning platforms, conferences or courses of your choice — We truly want you to learn
- 👩👩👦 👨👧👦 Parent and family planning friendly - If you’re already a parent, you can set a schedule that plans your work around your family, not the other way round. If you’re soon to be a parent, we will support you to take full maternity and paternity leave; this also counts for adoption. If you need a phased return to work or extra paid time off, we can offer this
- 🌈 Gender inclusive - We offer paid time off for anyone transitioning, undergoing hormonal treatment, or going through natural hormonal imbalances like menopause
- 🍽️ In-Person culture — We believe nothing beats the magic of great people working together in person, in and outside of working hours. Expect meaningful, laughter-filled conversations over shared meals and team-building activities.
- 🏰 Beautiful office in Gràcia, Barcelona — Our offices are much more than just a place to work. We like to see them alive 24/7, filled with friends and creative activities. Want to organize a community event, a rooftop concert, a BBQ with other designers, developers, etc.? The place is yours. Office pool included
- 🚚 Visa sponsorship and Relocation help — We want to work with the best people, regardless of where they're from. We'll help with your relocation costs and getting set up in Barcelona and will sponsor your visa if needed
- ✈️ Annual Team Retreats — So far we've been to Paris, Mallorca, the Pyrenees, Aran Islands, Dublin, and Sweden, where we had a small island to ourselves!
- 💻 The hardware and desk equipment that you need to be most productive.
Company values
- Win Your Way - We don't believe in dogma. We build our knowledge from the ground up and often arrive at conclusions different from everyone else
- Take each human interaction as a treasure - Invest in people. Care. Learn to listen and listen to learn
- Bootstrap is Everything - Ship fast. Do the simple thing first. Frugality rules. Don't fall into rabbit-holes. Building is not about vanity, it's about creation of value. Value can only be defined by users
- Go Deep - Don't stay on the surface. Tackle the problem with a methodological approach. Own it
- Opposition is True Friendship - Conflict is where the truth is. When there’s a conflict you don't smooth it over. You want to sharpen the contradictions, explore both opinions, and resolve it
Company HQ
Vila de Gràcia, Barcelona, Spain
Articles
Leadership
André Bastié
(CEO)Received a Master of Science in Electronic Commerce from Dublin City University in 2017. Experience as Sales Consultant for Intuit.
Marc Assens Reina
(CTO)Former Research Intern at Dublin City University, worked in Challenge Based Innovation at CERN, and was a Software Engineer Intern at elBulliFoundation.
Salary benchmarks
We don't have enough data yet to provide salary benchmarks for this role.
Submit your salary to help other candidates with crowdsourced salary estimates.
Diversity, Equity & Inclusion at Happy Scribe
Todora Krandeva (Talent)
- What we're aiming for
- 🎯 We're 35+ people at the moment and we're planning to grow by around 10 more by the end of the year. This is the most important time to prioritise Diversity, Equity and Inclusion. We want it set in the foundations of our core team
- 🤝 We believe diversity has to go hand-in-hand with equity and inclusion.
- Equity to us means going further than building a diverse team: we are intentionally aiming to bring in more diversity into the roles and departments where it can have the biggest impact, like engineering or leadership roles, where tech traditionally lacks diversity
- What we're doing. 🔎 Targeted sourcing. We consider applications from everyone, but when we look for candidates, we actively look for people who are under-represented at the moment in our company, especially in certain areas like engineering or product.
- ☂️ Inclusive job adverts thanks to neutral language and limited bullet points. We run all our job adverts through tools like Text Analysis and Gender Decoder. These tools detect linguistic biases to help ensure our copy is inclusive, well-balanced and accessible to everyone. We try to keep the core competencies in our job adverts under 6 bullet points since research shows any more than that decreases applications from female candidates.
- 🎓 No degree requirements. We don’t list university degrees as a requirement in our job adverts. Getting a degree isn't the only way to get really good at something, and we value real world experience as much as we value formal education
- 📈 Above market-rate wages. Rent in Barcelona is expensive and many roles outside of product simply don’t pay enough: we pay above market rate for these roles to make sure everyone can live comfortably whilst working here, not just the product team.
- ❓Structured interview processes with clear assessment criteria. Research shows that structured interviews help reduce bias when evaluating candidates. Of course, we don’t interview like robots: we ask personalised or follow up questions too! But we have a core set of questions that we ask everyone, with assessment criteria discussed in advance, so we everyone can be evaluated fairly
- 👥 Two people per interview (except the first call). We have two or more people from the team in each interview, except the first screening call, to avoid giving too much power to one person’s biases. Two interviewers can help make up for each other’s blind spots, notice something that the other person missed and help each other assess people more fairly. When we are unsure about someone, especially if it’s a screening call where only one person was interviewing, we get second opinions from other people in the team to check our biases. Sometimes we do this for applications as well.
- 🤓 We’re feedback nerds. We love giving feedback to candidates: we believe it’s important to give something back in exchange for the time invested in getting to know Happy Scribe. There’s an extra advantage to this: if the feedback needs to go to the candidate, it means it needs to be well articulated, fair and justified. A generic “no” isn’t a thing here, and this helps us make sure we’re not biased when we don’t move forward with someone.
- 🧠 Mental health support — We have partnered with Oliva to offer you the best mental health support, from day 1. You can access 1-1 online therapy as often as you need to and it’s 100% confidential
- 👩👩👦 👨👧👦 Parent and family planning friendly. If you’re already a parent, you can set a schedule that plans your work around your family, not the other way round. If you’re soon to be a parent, we will support you to take full maternity and paternity leave; this also counts for adoption. If you need a phased return to work or extra paid time off, we can offer this.
- We also offer paid time off for pregnancy loss and up to 6 days per year for fertility treatments: this might be used to rest after a procedure, recover from the emotional effects of treatments or to attend outpatient appointments and scans
- 🌈 Gender inclusive. We want all genders to feel included and comfortable. Our non-gendered toilets are stocked with free period care products. We also offer paid time off for anyone transitioning, undergoing hormonal treatment, or going through natural hormonal imbalances like menopause
- 📅 Celebrate what matters to you. Public holiday calendars revolve around specific cultural dates that may not matter to everyone. To help you celebrate what matters the most to you, you can choose to work a public holiday in exchange for another date. Want to swap Christmas with Eid or Easter with Diwali? You can do that
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