Backend Software Engineer (Senior/Staff/Principal-level)
Who we are
BookBub is one of the fastest-growing consumer tech startups in Boston (and we’re profitable). Millions of readers use BookBub every day to find great books, and our service empowers thousands of leading publishers and authors to drive sales and find new fans. We’re expanding our team to address the challenges and opportunities of the publishing industry while continuing to help readers find books and authors they’ll love. Learn more about what to expect working at BookBub.
Our engineering philosophy
We organize into small cross-functional teams that are deeply focused on one product or initiative. These teams are empowered to make product and technology decisions and quickly build the best solutions for our readers, publishers and authors. Our typical teams consist of two to four engineers, a product lead, and a designer. We lean heavily on automation, good test coverage, and continuous deployment to ensure we’re constantly getting rapid feedback from our users, and follow the approach of starting small, shipping often, and deferring unnecessary complexity. Our teams are strongest when we aren’t over-specialized or operating in separate silos, so most engineers rotate to a new team every 6-12 months.
We believe that we build better products when our teammates have a variety of perspectives and experiences, so we care a lot about creating a supportive and inclusive environment; it’s important that everybody who joins BookBub cares about this, too.
Learn more about what to expect in our engineering interviews.
In your first six months, you’ll likely:
- Design and build and deploy one or more new systems
- Ship code to production ~100 times via our continuous deployment pipeline
- Pick up a few new programming techniques and hear about several new technologies from our continuously learning team
- Build, launch and test several significant new book discovery features
- Write lots of integration and unit tests (no separate QA team here)
- Engage in many deep technical discussions with really friendly and talented engineers
- Solve at least one really hard scaling challenge
- Work across our entire stack: Rails, AWS, Postgres, React.js, Redis, Redshift, AWS Lambda, Ansible, Docker, Clojure, etc (it’s fine if you haven’t worked with this stack before)
We’re looking for engineers who:
- Are smart, friendly, collaborative, and intellectually curious
- Love to learn and teach, to be both mentors and mentees
- Are sensitive to the perspectives of others and care about creating a positive and inclusive environment
- Possess good judgement on technical tradeoffs
- Enjoy moving products forward quickly, but want to work at a sustainable pace—we're building a business with long-term value
- Have experience building web/mobile/internet products
- Note: distributed systems and high-scale experience are a big pluses, but not required
Benefits
BookBub offers competitive benefit options including medical, dental, vision, 401k, generous paid parental leave, and take-what-you-need paid time off.
Your interview experience
Our goal is to create an environment where you can interview at your best. If we can provide any assistance or accommodations during your time with us, please let us know at [email protected]. All requests are treated as privately as possible and have no impact on candidate eligibility.
BookBub strives to be an inclusive workplace and we value learning from different perspectives. We seek to foster an environment filled with people from a wide variety of backgrounds, experiences, abilities, and perspectives. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, color, ancestry, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, age, citizenship, marital status, disability, gender identity, or veteran status. We are proud to be an equal opportunity employer.