Desired Skills and Experience

  • Ownership of the technology stack/architecture, site reliability, and devops
  • Hiring, developing, and mentoring software engineers, qa, and sre/devops (3 front end, 2 back end, 1 systems, 1 QA)
  • Participate in, and manage the full development cycle: design, develop, QA, experiment, analyze, and deploy
  • Collaborating closely with PM and Design to architect features
  • Strong written communication skills. Your writing should be concise and clear in its specifications, but it will also need to “zoom out” and tell the product perspective on the engineering work being specified. You are responsible for giving the engineers enough “why” that they can attack the “how” with context to make sensible implementation decisions along the way
  • Ability to understand the whole infrastructure from JavaScript through caching, load-balancing, backend services, and the database when guiding and troubleshooting the team through architectural decisions, and
  • Keep the whole product in mind as well. Delay projects with high cost in engineering resources, or low business value. “Refactor” projects such that 80% of the business value is realized with only 1/2 of the engineering cost. Simplify specifications to always build the minimum viable product as round 1.
  • Have a “spidey sense” for when features are being over-engineered, or when there “just must a simpler way”
  • Put on your data hat, and pull analytics and statistics from the MySQL database as necessary. Over time, you’ll come to know the “shape” of the database schema better than anyone on the team
  • Closely manage the engineering processes and workflows, from feature conception through meetings and QA
  • Love “hacking” for the good of the product. If there’s something you can do easily yourself without building a whole feature (and involving the whole team in a simple thing) – do it!
  • Occasionally roll up your sleeves and write some code! This is perhaps only 10% of your time, but it can be useful when the project fills a key void in the calendar, or when you need to serve as a consultant for the team by understanding its workflows in depth
  • Demonstrated ability to balance product, engineering, and business objectives
  • 5+ years writing code with direct contact with product teams
  • 3+ years managing, hiring and mentoring engineers
  • Excellent verbal and written communication skills
  • Experience leading Agile(ish) team meetings
  • Comfortable managing some remote workers and flexible schedules
  • Experience with the following is a plus: JavaScript, Varnish, HAProxy, MySQL, MongoDB, Java, Hibernate, Solr / Lucene, Python / Django, AWS, SEO
  • A passion for the Instructables community, and online education
  • When applying, it is important to include your cover letter, resume, and, if you have one, your Instructables member name when you apply.

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