Platforms - Principal Engineer - Cloud (Backend)

Our client is looking for a dynamic & passionate Engineering Director who can lead

the tech-stack and drive teams with great leadership qualities.

Here is the JD for Director Engineering -

Responsibilities:

Completely responsible for product delivery, development process, and engineering

team performance. Provide overall direction to the engineering team.

Create a top-performing engineering team culture with high levels of team engagement

and satisfaction.

Work with the leadership team and product leaders to define engineering roadmaps and

solve business problems.

Drive engineering efforts to deliver releases with high quality and on time.

Communicate cross-functionally, hold your command in technical discussion, and have

strategic influence.

Work with the Talent Acquisition team to hire top talent, manage their performance,

and successfully mentor them to grow professionally.

Minimum Qualifications:

Hands-on technical expertise and management experience.

8+ years of people management experience.

Demonstrated experience to recruit and manage technical teams, including team

performance management.

Must have relevant experience in designing, building, maintaining, and extending large

scale production systems.

Have deep expertise in React.js, Node JS and MongoDB.

Strong software engineering skills and best practices including experience with a

modern agile development and deployment workflow.

Proven leadership skills; courage to challenge with candor, motivate and inspire teams.

Strong interpersonal and communication skills, for both technical and non-technical

audiences.

Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or related field.

GradRight is an ed-fin-tech startup focused on global higher education. Using data science, technology and strategic partnerships across the industry, we enable students to find the “Right University” at the “Right Cost”. We are on a mission to aid a million students to find their best-fit universities and financial offerings by 2025.

Our flagship product - FundRight is the world’s first student loan bidding platform. In a short span of 10 months, we have facilitated disbursements of more than $ 50 million in loans this year and we are poised to scale up rapidly.

We are launching our second product - SelectRight as an innovative approach to college selection and student recruitment for students and universities, respectively. The product rests on the three pillars of data science, transparency and ethics and hopes to create value for students and universities. 

Brief:

We are pursuing a complex set of problems that involve building for an international audience and for an industry that has largely been service-centric. As a Principal Engineer at GradRight, you’ll bring an unmatched customer-centricity to your work, with a focus on building for the long term and large scale.

You’ll drive the creation of frameworks that enable flexible/scalable customer journeys and tie them with institutional knowledge to help us build the best experiences for students and our partners. You’ll also manage a team of high performers to achieve the planned outcomes.

You’ll own the technology strategy of the engineering organization and be a key decision maker when it comes to processes and execution.

Responsibilities:

1. Drive design discussions and decisions around building scalable and modular architecture
2. Work with product, engineering and business teams to ideate on technology strategy and line up initiatives around the same
3. Build clean, modular and scalable backend services
4. Build clean, modular and scalable frontends
5. Own quality and velocity of releases across the engineering organization
6. Manage and mentor a team of engineers
7. Participate in sprint ceremonies and actively contribute to scaling the engineering organization from a process perspective
8. Stay on top of the software engineering ecosystem, propose and implement new technologies/methodologies as per the business needs
9. Contribute to engineering hiring by conducting interviews
10. Champion infrastructure-as-code mindset and encourage automation
11. Identify problems around engineering processes, propose solutions and drive implementations for the same

Requirements:

1. At least 8 years of experience, building large scale applications
2. Experience working at startups in growth phase with war stories to share
3. Experience with frontend technologies like vue.js or react.js
4. Strong experience with at least one backend framework, preferably express.js
5. Extensive experience in at least one programming language (preferably Javascript, GoLang) and ability to write maintainable, scalable and unit-testable code
6. Experience in CI/CD and cloud infrastructure management
7. Strong understanding of software design principles and patterns
8. Excellent command over data structures and algorithms
9. Passion for solving complex problems
10. Good understanding of various database technologies with strong opinions around their use cases
11. Experience with performance monitoring and scaling backend services
12. Experience with microservices and distributed systems in general
13. Experience with team management
14. Excellent written and verbal communication skills

Good to have:

1. Worked on products that addressed an international audience
2. Worked on products that scaled to millions of users
3. Exposure to emerging/latest technologies like blockchain, bots, AR/VR
4. Exposure to AI/ML

About HighLevel

HighLevel is an all-in-one, white-label marketing platform for agencies & consultants. Our goal as a business is to create a sustainable, powerful, “all things marketing” operating system that creates limitless opportunities for our customers. With over 20,000 customers, we need people like YOU to help us grow and scale even further in the coming years.

We currently have 300+ employees worldwide, working remotely as well as in our headquarters, which is located in Dallas, Texas.

Our goal as an employer is to maintain a strong company culture, foster creativity and collaboration, and, above all, encourage a healthy work-life balance for our employees wherever they call home

We encourage you to check out our youtube channel to learn more about our platform - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCXFiV4qDX5ipE-DQcsm1j4g 

About the team

The Expansion Products team is responsible for driving volumetric & usage based upgrades and upsells within the platform to maximize revenue potential (apart from the subscription revenue). We do this by building innovative products & features that solve real-world problems for agencies and allow them to consolidate their offering to their clients in a single platform packaged under their white-labled brand. 

The expansion products team focuses exclusively on products that can demonstrate adoption, drive up engagement in target segments and are easily monetizable. This team handles multiple product areas including Phone System, email system, online listing integration, WordPress Hosting, Memberships & Courses, Mobile Apps, etc. 

Why should you join HighLevel?

HighLevel is an exciting place to work because of the passionate, driven team that we have. At HighLevel

• It’s never somebody else’s job
• We are passionately focused on adding value for our users
• We deliver fast using lean principles. We go to market in weeks instead of quarters
• A good idea always gets tested
• We take care of our team so our team can take care of our users
• We embrace that improvement is constant and iterative
• You will learn how to scale B2B SaaS Startup and build relevant, impactful products for customers

About the role

We are looking for an experienced software engineer with strong technical and communication skills who has worked extensively on backend engineering systems that process large amounts of data at scale and managing services that handle thousands of requests every min.

Currently we process over a million messages and emails within our system every week. You will be responsible for strategizing, conceptualising and leading the development effort for the ISV team which will impact revenue generation for every agency in our platform for each message, call and email being processed. 

Type - Full Time (Remote in India)

Your Responsibilities

1. Responsible for developing backend services to provide integrated Twilio and Mailgun/Sendgrid capabilities within the platform.
2. Build a solid financial system to process rebilling for each message/email being processed.
3. Creating/customizing various web applications in Node.js, Vue.js
4. Lead and train a team of great engineers working with you.
5. Writing clean, tested, manageable code for services that scale to affect thousands of users everyday.
6. Troubleshoot, test, and maintain the core product software and databases to ensure strong optimization and functionality.

Your Core Skills

1. Solid Experience in Backend engineering with Node.js.
2. Proficient in dashboard development for various applications and should be comfortable understanding the flow of the software.
3. Experience with relational/non-relational databases ex: MySQL / MongoDB / Firestore and have used them to build transactional systems.
4. Hands-on experience in PHP and SOAP / REST-based Web Services development experience in a commercial environment
5. Should have experience with web services standards and related technologies (XML, JSON, REST, SOAP).
6. Ability to design and build web services, and integrations with third parties through API
7. Proficient understanding of code versioning tools such as Git / SVN
8. You have a deep understanding of micro-services architechture 
9. You have experience building event based systems (webhooks & listeners) 

Additional Skills

1. Experience with GCP technologies
2. Experience with Docker
3. Experience integrating Twilio / Plivo or similar APIs.
4. Experience with Mailgun / Sendgrid APIs.
5. Familiarity with banking / transactional applications.

• Do you like the idea of playing Master Shifu for product development teams? Or, what organizations think of it as playing an Engineering Manager.

• Do you live by the mantra of “buck stops with me”. Seriously, we also don’t know who Buck is and we are also looking for him.

• Have you led a product team of 15+ members in the past to successful outcomes? Okay, we would love to talk even if you unfortunately ran into a failure.

• Do you speak both binary and Humanary? Python , dialect, to talk to geeks and the Humanary, English or Hindi dialect, to talk to Clients. 

• Do you practice Agility? No, we don’t mean asanas from Baba Ramdev but things like Scrum or Kanban

• Do you practice Curiosity over Complacency? I..e are you a lean mean learning machine?

• Can you envision a solution architecture after hearing the product's vision and user stories? Do things like scalability, performability, flexibility, maintainability give you goosebumps of joy?

• Do you have an eye for good user experience?

Did you say Yes to all of them? My My! Love you! I’m sure your current team loves you too. But, if for whatever reason, you are looking for a new home then we would love to talk to you. We are a certified Great Place to Work, which means it’s a place where people love working with each other. And, you would too.

Send me an email, will ya?

1. Proven 9+ years of work experience in managing software development (Android/PHP) 
2. Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering or equivalent preferred.
3. Highly experienced with Agile development methodologies
4. Solid technical background with understanding and/or hands-on experience in software development and web technologies.
5. Strong problem solving skills and willingness to roll up one’s sleeves to get the job.
6. Skilled at working effectively with cross functional teams in a matrix organization.
7. Work well under pressure and be able to prioritize to meet deadlines and quickly shift priorities as necessary.
8. Ability to multi-task, work independently and demonstrate keen attention to details.
9. Team player attitude is mandatory.
10. High command in English Communication
11.  
12. Work on projects, build and manage diverse teams of engineers from different disciplines, formulate and execute strategies, and coordinate with other managers.
13. Plan, lead and manage a team of Software Engineers
14. Provide leadership to the core engineering team of product development professionals, to drive all pertinent issues related to the product development life cycle.
15. Build and execute the roadmap in terms of methodologies, development processes, and team enablement to enhance productivity and efficiency.
16. Apply knowledge of software engineering, programming, technologies, processes, and methodologies to develop, maintain and support the technical solutions.
17. Analyze problems and drive long term technology solutions to evolve the product scalability, performance, reliability and supportability
18. Partner with the Products team to contribute to the product strategy and support product vision
19. Planning and executing strategies for completing projects on time.
20. Researching and developing designs and products.