Technical Lead

For a client, we are looking for an Engineering Lead to join our Platform squad and help us build the infrastructure, developer tools, and frameworks that deliver amazing educational experiences to the children of the millions of families that use our mobile application.

At our client’s platform, they encourage candidates of all different backgrounds and identities to apply. They actively seek to hire individuals with different perspectives and eager to continue diversifying their company's culture. They strive to be an inclusive, supportive place where you can do the best work of your career.

Our client’s offices are in Madrid, Spain but the position is open to anyone within 2 hours of the CET timezone. 

About the job:

As the Engineering Lead for our Platform Squad you will take ownership, build upon, and improve the infrastructure, developer tools, and frameworks used by our product squads, as well as line managing and providing technical leadership to the engineers in Platform.

This is primarily a hands-on role: the management/leadership aspects will grow as the team scales.

More specifically, you will:

• Use your analytical skills to understand the needs of our product squads, and turn them into simple, well-documented, scalable, and secure services for them.
• Document technical and architectural decisions for the benefit of both engineering and product audiences.
• Improve and expand the system we use to track user activity and extract insights across our platform.
• Maintain and improve internal services and infrastructure such as:
• Our AWS deployment toolchain
• A Redis-backed message broker
• Integrations with third-party billing services (AppStore, Play Store, Stripe, Braintree)
• Integrations with third-party analytics, CRM, and customer success services
• Help keep our majestic monolith (Ruby on Rails, PostgreSQL, Redis, and Sidekiq) lean and modular.
• Own your work from development to production and ensure its quality, maintainability and supportability.
• Line manage engineers within the Platform squad (including 1-1s; performance management; career development).
• Provide technical leadership to engineers within Platform: helping to scope and prioritise work, mentoring, helping to resolve blockers and arbitrating any technical disputes.
• Take part in hiring and growing the team.

About you:

The ideal teammate for us would be someone who believes that communication, empathy, inquisitiveness, and open mindedness are fundamental to being successful in any endeavour.

You should have:

• Considerable experience designing and developing APIs with Ruby on Rails (or similar languages/frameworks) that scale to thousands of requests per minute. 

• A deep understanding of the backend stack: HTTP, Relational Databases, Background Processing Systems, Asynchronous Messaging Systems
• Experience in both horizontal and vertical scaling of backend systems
• A DevOps mentality of owning a service all the way to production.
• An appreciation for good User Experience (our engineers are our users and our tools strive to reflect that)
• The ability to manage and lead with empathy, supporting those on your team achieve their best

English is a must. We are a multicultural team and we are providing a service in English so, we don't care about certificates but we expect you to be able to communicate fluently.

You should feel equally comfortable communicating in long-form writing. Given the circumstances, we have become a fully remote company and we are firm believers that being articulate in both spoken and written long-form asynchronous communication is key to working efficiently together.

If you think you don't tick all the boxes, we'd still love to hear from you. Nobody checks every box, and we are looking for someone excited to join the team.