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 discover great books, and our service helps thousands of leading publishers and authors drive sales and find new fans. We're constantly growing our team to launch new consumer-facing book discovery features, tools for authors and publishers, and other web and mobile products that address the digital transition of the publishing industry. 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. 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 a tech lead (this position), a product lead, a designer and one to four other engineers. 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. Since our tech leads are in a position of leadership, it’s particularly important that they care about those things, too.

The tech lead position

Our tech leads’ primary responsibilities are to build significant systems and features, to think about how they can help their team hit their goals, to balance speed and tech debt and to ensure long-term health of the team and systems. They are experienced and well-rounded engineers with significant depth in at least one part of the stack. Beyond being great engineers, they are also excellent communicators who enjoy supporting their teammates and interacting with other teams. They care about our users and our product and can make meaningful contributions to the direction of the product, in partnership with product management and design. Tech leads also help to ensure the overall architectural integrity of BookBub’s systems through participating in cross-team design decisions and identifying technical obstacles and opportunities that impact the engineering team as a whole. Some of our tech leads are also people managers, but that is not required for this position.

In your first six months, you’ll likely:

* Lead a small engineering team to quickly design and build new products and features
* Ship code to production ~100 times via our continuous deployment pipeline
* Partner with a product leader to shape the roadmap of your product
* Nurture less experienced engineers and take part in their joy as they take on more and more
* Pick up a few new programming techniques and hear about several new technologies from our continuously learning team
* Write lots of integration and unit tests (no separate QA team here)
* Be heads down coding 80% or more of the time
* Collaborate with really friendly and talented engineers from other teams and engage in many deep technical discussions
* Solve at least a couple really hard scaling challenges
* Work with many parts of our 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
* Have experience leading an engineering team formally or informally
* Possess good judgement on making technical tradeoffs
* Are sensitive to the needs and perspectives of others and care about creating a positive and inclusive environment
* Enjoy moving products forward quickly, but want to work at a sustainable pace—we avoid burnout so we can build a business with long-term value
* Have in-depth experience building web/mobile/internet products
* Note: distributed systems and high-scale experience are a big pluses, but not required
* The tech lead role requires enough experience to be able to lead a team and and design large complex features and systems, but we care much more about abilities and attitude than a specific number of years of experience

Benefits

BookBub offers competitive benefit options including medical, dental, vision, 401k, generous paid parental leave, and take-what-you-need paid time off. Learn more about what to expect working at BookBub. 

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.