Technical Lead - remote

Posted 3 years ago

Summary

We are a tight-knit group with diverse backgrounds who value our culture. Individually, we strive to be humble, hungry, and people-smart. As a team we put learners first, we share before we are ready, we ask clarifying questions, we highlight what’s working, we have difficult conversations, we get agreements, and we make time for life. These aren’t just slogans we put on the wall…we love and live by our culture.

We are looking for a Lead Software Engineer who can bring a mindset of continuous innovation to our fast paced environment. This involves establishing a technical vision, resolving technical disagreements, and managing the technical quality of team deliverables (source). A person in this role has a strong technical background in both the frontend and backend aspects of an application.

Tech leads at Lessonly are responsible for working closely with a product manager to determine the high-level feasibility and cost of features and product changes. The tech lead serves as the subject-matter expert for all things related to their product to the product manager, other engineers, designers, QA, and tech leads on other squads. Additionally, tech leads serve as agile coaches for their squads, helping estimate tasks, break-down work into smaller pieces, and remove blockers that prevent the team hitting their commitments.

Responsibilities

  • Senior Full-stack Engineer
    • Consistently ships high-quality back-end and front-end code
      • Currently at a high level, our tech stack/tooling includes Rails, React, AWS
    • Delivers awesome, customer-focused solutions iteratively.
  • Technical Product Discovery
    • Works closely with product management and design to assess the technical possibilities and understand or test the feasibility of potential solutions that meet customer needs.
  • Architect / Squad subject-matter expert
    • Collaborates and coordinates with the tech leads of other Lessonly squads to share knowledge and ensure technical excellence and innovation
    • Understands both the frontend and backend aspects of the squad’s functional responsibilities.
    • May not know the answer to every question but is willing to find out.
    • Reviews code and provides recommendations to other team members
    • On-call for issues related to the squad’s functional responsibilities
  • Team Lead
    • Keeps the team accountable on roadmap commitments
    • Brings up any timeline risks early and collaborates to find a way to mitigate them.
    • Works with all members of the team to determine roadmap commitments
    • Able to break down work into bite-size pieces
    • Sets an example for the team in transparency and asking clarifying questions.

What to expect in this role?

A tech lead at Lessonly IS:

  • Mentoring, reviewing code, and generally helping their fellow engineers. (We already expect this, but still, I’m calling it out)
  • The person most-responsible when it comes to technical issues or decisions on a squad.
  • Working closely with the product managers and designers to innovate and discover awesome solutions.
  • Providing high-level cost and time estimates for solutions.
  • Working with the engineers on a squad to come up with refined estimates the closer we get to build and delivery.
  • Writing code everyday that makes the product better

A tech lead at Lessonly IS NOT:

  • Managing the engineers on their squad or conducting 1:1s.
  • The sole person consulted for squad related decisions. They may have the biggest say or strongest opinion, but other engineers count.
  • The only person estimating work. This is still a squad function, but with their oversight.

Lessonly Benefits

  • A whole person approach to taking care of you with medical, vision, dental, disability, financial, mental, and life benefits
  • Time for life with unlimited PTO, Summer Break (all-company week of vacation in July) and Winter Holiday (all-company time off in December)
  • Paid parental leave for primary and secondary caregivers
  • Giving back to our communities with dollars and volunteer time through our Brighter Indy program
  • Flexibility to #dobetterwork in the location that works best for you ––the Indianapolis office, your home office or that local coffee shop you love
  • Recognition for the work you do and the success of our team ––shout outs, weekly MVPly award, quarterly Golden Llama award, equity, and a team that is always excited to celebrate meeting a challenge