Front-End Performance Engineer - remote

Float
Posted 2 years ago
Description

Float is the world’s leading software for teams to plan their time. And behind it is a world-class team. From New York to the UK, Canada to South Africa—our Engineering, Product, Marketing, 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.

Requirements

Why We’re Hiring For This Role

Our Director of Engineering, Colin, explains the important role you will play within our Engineering team. Watch this video.
In this role, you will be a key player in our team of Application Engineers creating and maintaining our product. You will work closely with our Product team and other Front-End Engineers to ensure we deliver the next generation of our product, capable of handling multiples of our current scale. This will involve digging deep into our existing product features to uncover areas for improvement and due care and attention in new product features.

An important aspect of this role is to help define and maintain acceptable performance thresholds for our web application, ensuring that customers continue to experience the fast and responsive interface they’ve come to expect from Float.

We’re looking for an experienced front-end engineer to dive head-first into leading JavaScript performance optimization efforts for the world’s leading resource planner. We are looking for a Senior Front-end Performance Engineer who gets more satisfaction by plugging memory leaks than building new features.

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

This role is responsible for our web application performing at a level that we are proud to show off regardless of customer size or amount of data. With your keen eye for identifying when a problem originates at the data layer, you will communicate and guide the team towards the optimal data model for the scenario. Your experience allows you to know when to favour optimizing for time and/or space complexity, and how to strike a balance between algorithmic optimization and readability.

Early on, you’ll jump right into:
  • Understanding the current experience for our larger customers
  • Proposing &prototyping approaches to resolve any immediate issues
  • Putting measures in place to ensure performance doesn’t degrade

Once you are a bit more settled, we expect that you will jump into the following projects:
  • Defining and iterating on performance optimizations for various aspects of our web application
  • Building a suite of front-end performance tests that execute as part of a continuous integration pipeline
  • Developing new features with performance in mind by acting as a consultant, advisor, and gatekeeper

What You’ll Need To Be Successful

Essentially, you’re a JavaScript expert who knows how to make sense of flame graphs, memory snapshots, and call trees to identify and fix bottlenecks. You have experience working with JavaScript libraries and frameworks (especially React) and know when and how to obsess on minimizing re-renders / re-paints / re-layout / re-composition -- and understand the difference between these steps. You can instinctively recognize non-performant JS / CSS (especially those janky animations). You understand the event loop, and how to work with it to get to high FPS (requestAnimationFrame is your friend).

To be successful in this role, you will need the following skills and experience:
  • Expert front-end skills, including React
  • Experience with implementing performance monitoring, analysis, and testing using tools such as Chrome DevTools, React Profiler, and Lighthouse
  • Experience identifying and resolving bottlenecks in performance, including familiarity with applying the RAIL model
  • Experience visualizing and presenting performance data to the wider team and stakeholders
  • Deep knowledge of data layer optimization techniques as well as modern bundling tools &configurations
  • (Bonus) Experience leading and mentoring team members, particularly in the area of front-end performanceAs 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 People Ops. 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 Artem or Sameet, members of our Engineering team, for a technical interview. This is generally a 45-minute interview that will take a deep dive into your technical skills and experience.
  • Leadership Interview: As the final step in the process, you’ll meet with Colin, Director of Engineering, 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 People Ops 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.