Senior React Software Engineer

The company

They are a remote first company of 40 people scattered across the globe. They are profitable and growing rapidly, which is to say: they’re hiring!

They build lightweight productivity and communication tools on top of Google Workspace that are trusted by more than 200,000 organizations worldwide and installed by more than 40 million users. Their software aims to help users automate and scale their everyday tasks, without needing to leave the things they know best: Gmail, Google Sheets, and Google Forms.

Some tools they built:

• A mail merge tool for Gmail. (10,000,000+ installs)
• A document merge solution to automatically merge/generate PDF, Google Docs™, Sheets™, Slides™, Microsoft Word, Excel, etc (10,000,000+ installs)
• A data connector to export data from applications such as Salesforce, Jira, Hubspot or Zendesk into Google Sheets™ and embed them in a website- no coding required. (10,000,000+ installs)

Job Description

They are looking for a highly motivated Software Engineer to join their growing engineering team. You will be responsible for the end-to-end development of core parts of the product. We expect you to help us take their products and their team to the next technical level and to teach us something we don’t know.

Their tech stack:

Their products are typically made of the following subproducts:

• A Google Workspace add-on which is a small real-estate web-app integrated with Google Sheets/Forms. This is where the bulk of the functionality is exposed to users.
• A typical dashboard front-end, which contains administration and analytics.
• A business logic back-end
• A payments and billing back-end
• A logging and analytics pipeline
• A marketing website

Their product infrastructure is hosted on Google Cloud Platform:

• They run logic on App Engine, Cloud Functions, Cloud Pub Sub, Cloud Storage
• They store data in Firebase, PostgreSQL, Redis, BigQuery
• They code in TypeScript (React), Google Apps Script, NodeJS and Java. They are keen to introduce a new strong back-end language such as Golang in their stack. Their marketing websites are coded in NextJS and hosted on Vercel.

Some examples projects that you could work on:

• Creating a design system
• Developing new features
• Revamping a core part of the UI
• Improving front-end performance
• Making their UI more accessible
• Implementing a localized UI
• Creating playgrounds for their marketing websites
• Implementing tracking of events

Core responsibilities:

• Taking full responsibility for big projects and core parts of the product from a software engineering perspective
• Writing technical specifications for and developing new large features
• Contributing to product specification by evaluating the technical difficulty of a project
• Proactively proposing architecture, performance and infrastructure improvements
• Owning the release process, improving the software engineering life cycle (build, CI/CD)
• Helping set and maintain a high professional standard
• Helping junior developers to grow

How the dev teams work:

• Each product team is currently composed of 2-4 developers, 1 QA and 1 QA Automation, and 1 designer.
• They do not use any agile frameworks as they have found them not to be agile at all. They instead carve out projects that should last between two to six weeks, and meet daily for 5-15 minutes to discuss our progress and reevaluate priorities if need be. They hold a longer (~1h) meeting per week to plan the week ahead.
• Short-term tasks are tracked on a very simple Gantt chart in a Google Sheet and specifications are written in Google Docs.
• Developers use Jira to create and track tickets. They use Github and pull requests for version control. They use Github Actions for continuous deployment with automated tests.
• Communication with the wider team is done through email, Google Docs, a little bit of Slack and Google Meet.

Wanted Profiles

You:

• 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 building, owning and running entire systems (new billing system, new api)
• Deep, substantial expertise in multiple programming environments
• You can provide material feedback on the work of junior programmers
• You’re a fan of spreadsheets and their programming paradigm
• You’re a team player

Qualifications:

• Experience: 6+ years as a professional programmer on products, preferably cloud products with many users
• Programming languages: you have solid experience in ReactJS, Typescript and CSS. Bonus points for NextJS
• Software engineering tools: you’ve worked with git and Jira, you’re familiar with build tools, benchmarking, CI/CD and profiling tools
• Language: excellent in English, both written and oral
• Writing: you enjoy writing, you care about words and grammar

Infra

Their product infrastructure is hosted on Google Cloud Platform:

• They run logic on App Engine, Cloud Functions, Cloud Pub Sub, Cloud Storage
• They store data in Firebase, PostgreSQL, Redis, BigQuery

They code in TypeScript (ReactJS), Google Apps Script, NodeJS and Java. They are keen to introduce a new strong back-end language such as Golang in our stack. Our marketing websites are coded in NextJS and hosted on Vercel.