The Opportunity
Shorthand is a growing company that provides a digital publishing platform to many of the world’s best-known publishers, brands, not-for-profits, and universities. With customers on every continent (except Antarctica!), there’s never been a more exciting time to join Shorthand. Our company has a rare distinction in this era of money-burning startups of being comfortably profitable. We're a small team of geeks with art and heart, and a high bar for quality.
We’re introducing a new role for a Senior Software Engineer (Growth). The role will be perfect for an experienced full stack software engineer who has an analytical bent and enjoys working on business, UX, and optimisation problems with a data-driven experimental approach.
The successful candidate will contribute to Shorthand’s Growth function, taking the lead on implementing growth experiments and testing new onboarding flows for our SaaS platform. The objectives of the growth experiments will be to improve the product onboarding experience, website design, and human onboarding touchpoints for maximum user satisfaction and retention.
The role involves a high degree of autonomy and creativity, and will suit somebody who is passionate about learning, metrics, and delivering outstanding user experiences.
Growth at Shorthand is a new function that offers exciting opportunities for affecting change to the core product and its user base, as well as significant opportunities to bring together disparate tools, data and teams across the company. The role will be especially rewarding to candidates who are interested in acquiring broad knowledge on how to successfully grow a product’s user base and scale an early-to-mid stage SaaS business.
The Role
We tend to do things a little differently at Shorthand. For one thing, we’re a small, fully remote team distributed around the world —and have been fully remote for over three years. You’ll be working from home, or from a coworking location of your choice. You’ll be based somewhere in South-East Queensland or a compatible timezone.
As Senior Software Engineer (Growth), you’ll play a critical role in formulating and executing agile yet rigorous growth experiments aimed at improving the onboarding and retention of satisfied users. You’ll work closely with the other members of the Growth team to identify and test key hypotheses. You’ll help put in place the software frameworks and tool integrations needed to:
- carry out split testing and other experiments,
- collect product and marketing analytics, and
- support customer-facing teams with better workflows for sales and marketing activities, onboarding new users and identifying at-risk accounts.
You’ll work cross-functionally with colleagues across the Growth, Product, Engineering, Success, Marketing, and Sales teams, reporting to the VP Growth.
We are looking for someone who:
- Is whip-smart, as demonstrated by career achievements and/or school/university results.
- Is data-driven and analytical.
- Is experienced at implementing product and/or marketing analytics infrastructure, and using analytics platforms to derive, report on, and action key insights.
- Is an SQL wizard, able to bridge the gaps between databases, spreadsheets, and third-party applications.
- Is experienced in system design and system integration.
- Has a wide range of experience and expertise across languages, frameworks and approaches such as JavaScript, TypeScript, ReactJS, NodeJS, and scripting.
- Is an expert in using git.
- Has a high bar for quality, but is not afraid to move quickly when warranted.
- Is thorough and detail-oriented.
- Can learn fast.
- Gains deep satisfaction from helping to make products and processes better.
- Has experience of working in a small business or startup environment.
- Preferably has experience collaborating with diverse, geographically-dispersed teams.
Core Responsibilities:
You’ll be responsible for:
- Helping to formulate growth hypotheses and design growth experiments, alongside the VP Growth and Growth UX Lead;
- Taking the lead on implementing new product flows and features to support exploratory research and in-production product improvements to help make our users more successful;
- Identifying and integrating appropriate toolsets and platforms to assist with:
- executing experiments within Shorthand’s marketing site and storytelling platform;
- analysing key data and automating reporting;
- supporting customer success functions —for example, through reporting of account health and onboarding milestones;
- improving marketing automation flows such as user onboarding journeys and email sequences;and
- improving data flows between disparate systems such as billing, CRM, user onboarding, customer success, analytics and other systems.
Qualifications:
- A minimum of 5 years of experience in software engineering roles.
- A minimum of 3 years of experience in web application development.
- Prior experience with analytics platforms such as Google Analytics, Mixpanel, or Amplitude. Bonus points for experience with customer data platforms such as Segment.
- Prior experience working alongside key stakeholders to model required data and instrument websites and apps for conversion and funnel analytics.
- Prior experience with query languages, analytics and reporting platforms such as SQL, Python/Pandas, R, Google Data Studio and Tableau.
- University qualification in computer science, mathematics or a closely related field, or equivalent career experience.
Personality Attributes:
- You are a proactive self-starter who does not need to be told what to do and will be resourceful in order to find solutions to any challenge.
- You thrive in a fast-paced and demanding environment and possess a high level of intellectual curiosity.
- You are collaborative.
- You find fulfilment in the job itself, and happiness in a job well done.