Senior Technical Lead / CTO - remote

Talarian
Posted 3 years ago
We Work Remotely
Company/Product
Talarian is a small, growing, and profitable software company that is building the future of spreadsheet-driven business applications. Our main products are YAMM, Awesome Table, and Form Publisher. They are used and loved by millions and some of the most popular products in the Google Workspace marketplace.

Our company is around 30 people, remote-first and global (we have people based in many Western and Eastern Europe countries, Philippines, Nigeria, Uzbekistan), all highly motivated and dedicated.

Job
We are hiring a highly motivated Senior Technical Lead/CTO who will take ownership of the technical strategy and execution of YAMM development, with the possibility to enlarge the scope to more products after some time.
This is both a leadership and hands-on role: you will have to get your hands dirty at times and dig in code

The YAMM product team is composed of 4 developers, 1 tester, 1 QA Automation and 1 designer. We expect you to help us take our product, infrastructure and team to the next technical level. We expect you to teach us many things we don’t know.

You will report to the Talarian CTO and will work closely with the Support teams.

Our applications are built with React, Typescript, Google Apps Script, Firebase, Node JS, Java, PostgreSQL, Playwright and Selenium. Everything is on Google Cloud Platform and Vercel. We use Github, Jira, SonarCloud, Sentry and Lambdatest.


Why it’s technically interesting to work on YAMM:
  • SMTP is a wonderful protocol but it comes with many idiosyncrasies, and making sure emails sent in bulk are delivered is a real technical challenge
  • Building on top of Google means building on top of a fast-evolving platform. They push us forward, and we must keep up
  • YAMM is a global-scale product, used by millions around the world in every kind of organization to send billions of emails
  • YAMM is made of many different subsystems
  • YAMM is built on serverless components allowing it to scale nicely
  • We are currently in the process of refactoring core parts of the infrastructure in depth in order to allow for our next big projects, and there are many interesting architecture and code decisions to be made

Core responsibilities:
  • Taking full responsibility of YAMM from an infrastructure, architecture, code, run and build perspective
  • Leading, mentoring and growing the technical team
  • Owning the planning, staffing and release process
  • Writing technical and architecture specs
  • Improving team development processes and productivity
  • Providing measurable and scalable engineering support processes

You:
  • You have extensive architecture and coding experience
  • You care more about making reliable software used by many than a shiny unstable thing used by no one. You understand that engineering work is done first and foremost for the customers.
  • You care a lot about performance, understand that speed is a core feature
  • Fully capable of architecting, owning and running entire systems (new add-on, new billing system, new api, new webapp, new integration)
  • Deep, substantial expertise in multiple programming environments and databases
  • You understand people, and can provide material feedback on the work of programmers
  • You’re a very strong communicator, both written and verbal

Qualifications:
  • Experience: 6+ years as a professional programmer and 3+ years in a tech  lead or engineering manager role, preferably on a large scale product
  • Cloud: you have deep experience with one of the 3 main cloud platforms. Bonus points for GCP and serverless experience
  • Programming languages: you have experience with many programming languages, including Java.
  • Software engineering tools: you’re familiar with build, profiling and code quality tools
  • Language: completely fluent in English
  • Writing: you enjoy writing, you care about words and grammar, you are sharp and thorough

Benefits (subject to change depending on where you live):
  • A good compensation that gives you financial peace of mind, wherever you live
  • Paid vacation
  • Medical, dental and vision insurance
  • Paid parental leave

How to apply:
We want to get a sense of how you think. To that end, please use your cover letter to write about the following:
  • Show us some technical specs you’ve written that you’re proud of if possible
  • Tell us about something you’ve built in the past, what where the tradeoffs, the challenges, and how you made your technology choices
  • Tell us what you’re excited about in software engineering these days
  • Tell us why you want this job
Working with us requires a lot of writing/communicating, so please use your application to show off those skills.
Send us your cover letter and resume, plus any public profile or material you feel relevant. 

Interview process (subject to change):
  • Discovery interview with the CTO and CEO
  • If that goes well, we’ll send you a take-at-home technical test that will include coding
  • You’ll then move on to an interview with some Lead Engineers
  • A final interview with the CTO and CEO
  • We can’t wait to hear from you!