Back-end Engineer

Position details

Spotted Zebra is looking for someone to join their engineering team as a Senior Back-end Engineer. Your biggest challenge will be to take both an individual contributor and leadership role in the continued design and build of their core Skills Cloud, as well as the workforce and HR applications that sit on top of it. Their focus is on implementing an architecture that breaks down dependencies to allow for multiple innovative and decoupled engineering teams to deliver applications at high velocity.

Your role will include working with your globally distributed engineering, product, design, and management colleagues. You’ll have the opportunity to mentor junior members of the team but also the option to focus as an individual highly skilled contributor. Either way, you’ll bring the best out in others, support them, challenge them and laugh with them and as a result, you’ll make some lifelong friends and colleagues.

Project details

The Skills Cloud allows senior executives to assess the skills of their entire workforce, identify critical skills gaps, and take corrective action to address these gaps in hiring, development, and internal mobility efforts. Today, skills are taking center stage.

Apart from that, Spotted Zebra has been shortlisted for two prestigious IHR - In-house Recruitment awards – for “Assessment Solution of the Year” and “Technical Hiring”. The award nominations recognize the highly innovative, skills-based solution that was implemented for their Apprenticeship hiring in 2021-22.

Team 

The engineering team will be growing by 4x over the next 12 months so they are looking for senior engineers that can come in now and quickly develop to a team leadership role to support that growth and have ownership over one or more microservices. The role will have a high degree of direct coding and will also involve you in software architecture discussions.

Existing team: 

1x Head of Data Science
1x Head of Engineering (in progress)
1x Senior Back-end Engineer
2x Senior Front-end Engineers
2x Junior Full-stack Engineers

Key Responsibilities

• Collaborate with your senior colleagues in Engineering, Data Science, QC, and DevOps to create team structures, processes, and policies

• You’ll be highly engaged with the Product Team, both contributing your ideas and helping develop your colleagues’ ideas

• During ideation, you'll help the team prototype, identify key technical risks, and validate (or invalidate) ideas rapidly and accurately

• Having been part of the problem definition, you’ll own the outcome and focus on solving the problem and exceeding expectations rather than simply delivering features 

• You’ll be empowered to ensure you and the team are geared to deliver continuously with high velocity. By minimizing technical debt and internal dependencies, you'll break down barriers that slow you and the team down

• You will likely have ownership over one or more microservices. You’ll get to focus on Making by delivering reliable, clean, and efficient code and by automating testing

Requirements 

• Spent the majority of your career as a backend engineer. You have excellent experience with NodeJS, Typescript, Postgres, and ideally GraphQL. You may have instead spent a significant amount of time as a Java engineer but have at least one year’s exposure to NodeJS

• Exposure to SaaS is a business that has scaled across several products or modules, ideally with a common platform to deliver ‘consumer grade’ products. Understanding of OOP/OOD

• Microservice infrastructure in a high availability environment 

• Worked in and helped scale engineering teams in excess of 10 individuals

• Been part of a team that has implemented CI/CD

About this company 

Spotted who? Spotted Zebra! They help enterprises solve the huge problem of aligning their workforce to the skills that are required to face tomorrow’s challenges. Spotted Zebra is now providing their clients with data at the granular level of an employee that they have never seen before.

With Spotted Zebra, clients can put skills at the center of every decision made about people, transforming their workforces into ones that are ready for tomorrow. With several FTSE100 customers, they just closed a funding round led by a top European VC fund. Now, they're building the right team to lead the multi-billion dollar strategic workforce planning technology market.

Working conditions

• B2B/Work contract

• Remote working model 

• Flexible start hours (7 - 9 AM UK time) 

• 20 vacation days

Benefits

• Working directly with the founders and Head of Engineering, this is a great opportunity for personal development in a fast-paced and supportive environment.

• Ownership: You’ll own a piece of Spotted Zebra through our option scheme. With VC funding we are aiming high and want you to share in that success. 

Selection process

• FatCat Select HR & Tech Screening 

• Client-side Intro call

• Client-side Short questionnaire

• Client-side Interview 

• Client-side Take-home Task

• Client-side Task Revision & Interview