The company
Silverorange is a design and development agency based in Canada. When pursuing work, we focus on interesting and meaningful projects. Over our 23 years as a company, we’ve worked with well-known technology organizations like Duolingo and Mozilla, not-for-profit organizations working in areas including arts funding and affordable internet access for low-income families, and with world-renowned doctors training other doctors through online education.
We’re proud of the fantastic products we’ve built in partnership with our clients and we’re actively invested in the processes behind these products. Within the next 6 months, we expect our team to grow from 31 to 34 people in order to meet the needs for new and existing projects. Our growth is careful and considered. We are committed to fostering a team-focused approach in our work of building great user-focused systems, while also placing a serious emphasis on quality of life, openness, empathy, and a supportive work environment.
The position
We’re looking for a Technical Lead to oversee the technical aspect of development for overlapping development teams that focus on one of our largest partners working in emergency medical education. This role would include planning, designing, leading, and executing technical solutions and improvements. The main tech stack for this client is currently React, Node, PHP, a large Postgres database, and Firestore. We are open to individuals of various experience levels, though ideally you’ll be joining us with at least one prior full-time experience in a technical leadership role. We favour applicants with a strong sense of ownership over their own work. Excitement and ability to learn and contribute is more important to us than other metrics like years of experience.
This position is available immediately and we will work with you to get you started as soon as possible.
Responsibilities
- Work closely with the Product Owner to determine how product requirements will be implemented from a technical perspective.
- Work with the Product Owner to provide guidance to the Operations team and our client on future contracts.
- Consult with our client to provide them with rough estimates or guidance.
- Collaborate with the team to identify and fix technical problems and roadblocks.
- Identify critical project dependencies &gaps.
- Work closely with developers and QA to define solutions and acceptance criteria.
- Quality control, including backlog grooming and planning our way out of tech debt.
- Participate in code reviews and refine the code review process.
- Set the programming guidelines, most used libraries, and technologies for assigned projects.
- Collaborate with Project Managers to ensure that the team’s tasks are aligned with the goals and timeline of the project, delegating workload according to skill, experience, and professional development goals.
- Balance deadlines and client needs with a supportive work environment and focus on quality of life.
- Help manage the long-term maintenance of older code systems, and the sustainable migration of code to newer platforms.
- Direct triage efforts in cases of outages or technical failures.
- Provide employee feedback and contribute to reviews for the development team.
Requirements
- Be eligible &available to work from Canada.
- Have a passion for learning and self-improvement, both in terms of the tools and methodologies we use as a team, and personally.
- Have strong written and verbal communication skills and have significant experience communicating with a team.
- Have excellent analytical and problem solving skills.
- Be able to quickly learn and understand new systems.
- Have an ongoing knowledge of industry best-practices.
- Have a strong understanding of core full-stack Web application architecture, including front-end, backend, and devops technologies.
- Have experience using version control systems like Git to manage changes.
- Be able to communicate clearly with clients and co-workers across multiple time zones. Several of our key clients are in California and we have team members in British Columbia, Alberta, Ontario, Quebec, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, PEI, as well as Ecuador and the United Kingdom.
- Experience with elements of our current tech stack, including React, Node, PHP, a large Postgres database, and Firestore, would be a strong asset. Knowledge of Swift, Kotlin, and the AWS (Amazon Web Services) system would also be a bonus.
Growth &ownership
Our team is co-operative and will help you learn and expand your skills via mentoring, team-wide support, and learning opportunities. All members of the team are encouraged and given space to grow as individual contributors, and have ongoing opportunities in project and team leadership.
We’re excited to hear your fresh ideas and approach. We have decades of collective experience, and we all continue to become better at what we do by both teaching and learning from each other. Add your voice to our mix.
Opportunity for employee ownership is a fundamental part of silverorange (non-founders currently own more than a third of the company) and we’re currently working on new ways to transfer even more ownership to employees.
Inclusion &diversity
People with different backgrounds and experiences make us stronger, and we’re always looking for ways to improve. Our team is getting more diverse across many dimensions of diversity, but we’re still missing perspectives that could make our work better. We highly encourage people from traditionally underrepresented groups in our industry to apply—we’d love to hear from you.
Remote working is just as good as local
Our team has been remote-friendly for over 20 years, and remote-first for the last 8. We continue to improve our approach to having a dispersed team. This is a full-time remote position regardless of location, though you are welcome to work from our lovely offices in Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island, Canada.
Over half of our team is full-time remote and 95% of our clients are remote. You’ll need to be comfortable working with a remote team regardless of your location.
Typically all employees spend at least one week each year working from our Charlottetown office so plan on visiting PEI semi-regularly once you feel safe traveling.
Though you may be working remotely, you’ll be an active member of a great and small but growing team, both here at silverorange and with our clients. Regular voice or video communication will help keep you in touch with the smart people with whom you’ll be working.
Benefits &compensation
- Flexible work days, approached collaboratively with you to allow for the realities of appointments, family minding, and your everyday life.
- 3 weeks of paid vacation, on top of 10 paid days of civic holidays, and 3 weeks of paid company-wide shut down.
- Generous health and dental coverage, with 100% of premium covered by silverorange.
- New computer hardware every 3 years, and other tools as needed.
- Yearly company-wide bonuses based on overall company success, plus ownership opportunities and dividends for long-term employees.
- Salaries based on experience starting at CAD $85,000-97,000 per year, with both annual company wide salary band adjustments as well as opportunities and expectation of ongoing career and compensation growth.
- Additional remote worker salary add-on of CAD $3,000 per year and a wellness salary add-on of $500 per year.
How to apply
Click Apply Now and include a copy of your resume, any links you have to relevant examples of recent work, and an explanation of why you’d be great for the job. Tell us about an interesting project you’ve worked on or helped ship.
We want people to feel they can be their genuine selves at work, so we’d love to hear about who you are. If there is anything else you would like to share with us — i.e. a Medium or Twitter account, online writing or select blog posts, etc. — please feel free to include those as well.
If you require accommodations at any phase of the application or interview process, please let us know. We would be happy to support you and discuss accommodations as required.
We will be accepting applications for this position until Friday, February 24th.