Overview

Soapbox, the latest addition to our growing product suite of our multimedia brand marketing and analytics platform, is a video messaging and communications tool that helps front line brand ambassadors and content creators record, edit, and share videos with others within minutes. 

We’re building a diverse and inclusive team composed of engineers, product managers, designers, and UX researchers to support our vision for the product, and looking for a technology-minded, but customer-focused full-stack engineer to join our team. 

Why Now?

Thousands of Soapbox videos are created and shared by our customers every day. With the increase in remote work, which is causing companies and individuals to rethink how to gather and communicate, Soapbox is experiencing rapid growth and adoption across the world. 

As we support a rapidly growing base of customers, our goal is to ensure that the product remains simple and delightful to use; fast, reliable, and scalable; and able to handle an increasing amount of high quality video being produced and played by users across a number of browser combinations and devices. In addition, ensuring cohesion across Wistia’s platform, comprising our flagship video and audio hosting, marketing, and analytics services, will become even more critical as we scale. 

Our Ideal Candidate

• Has seen the good, the bad, the ugly, and the just plain quirky of the internet.
• Has multiple years of experience working in CSS, HTML, and JavaScript, and  and is excited to use it in ways that get into the guts of internet video and potentially messaging/chat applications 
• Has strong back-end language experience, and not opposed to working with Ruby or Elixir  
• Is excited by the challenge of having to make our product work fast and well in the wild, under all kinds of conditions (browser-specific constraints, connection speed constraints, etc).
• Cares about increasing the accessibility of the web generally and video on the web in particular.
• Has experience working on cross-functional product teams, and engaging with business problems, whether as a full time developer or freelancer.
• Enjoys working with others to solve not just technical, but people, design, and product challenges.
• Is passionate about helping other engineers grow.

Key Responsibilities 

• Collaborating with product, design, and research leads to deeply understand the issues faced by our customers and their customers, the end users, and opportunities to address them
• Work with the team inclusively to make technical and product decisions that are consonant with Wistia’s company values: simplicity, presentation, long-term company thinking, and creativity.
• Take responsibility for scoping, technical design, and implementation of major features, as well as helping out with ongoing team activities such as bug fixes, responding to outages, addressing technical debt in the code base, working with our customer support folk to troubleshoot customer issues, and participating in cross-team discussions and initiatives.
• Partnering with the GM on decisions about engineering processes and tools in order to enable the team to do their best work 

 Soapbox Team DNA

These are qualities we look for in Soapbox engineering positions, and why we feel they're so important. It's a mouthful--but if you'd like to gain a clearer picture of the team and culture you'd be applying to join, please read on. 

Values & Mindset

• You are curious and enjoy learning. We’re constantly faced with the unknown at Wistia. How do we create an analytics tracking system for 360 video? How do we scale the data store for it? What does it mean for that system to be reliable, and how can we measure and achieve that?
  
• You are generous with knowledge and support you provide to others. We believe in the adage “a rising tide lifts all boats”, and that the time we choose to invest in supporting each other is never wasted. Whether an IC or people manager, we value team members who give back.
  
• You think for yourself and you're willing to speak up. We hire people because we value their thoughts, insights and experiences. These things matter a great deal more to us than conventional wisdom or herd mentalities in technical communities -- always think for yourself and don't hold back!

Team DNA

• You are a cross-functional collaborator. Whether through pair programming, a whiteboard session, or a casual lunch conversation, collaboration helps the best ideas and practices to proliferate.
  
• You're empathetic and emotionally intelligent. Sometimes things don't go smoothly. A customer gets frustrated, or a coworker does something that bothers you. Understanding where others are coming from, and being in control of and deliberate about how you respond to them, empowers you to solve problems while also being supportive of and sensitive to those around you.
  
• You have strong communication skills. Each of us has only part of the overall picture in our head at a given time. Explaining ideas at an understandable level of abstraction, and to different audiences across the business, is critical to achieving a shared vision.

Development

• You know your fundamentals. Fads and frameworks come and go. We’re less worried that you know the Next Hot Thing™ than that you feel comfortable dealing with the underlying data structures, algorithms, languages, and protocols that make web applications work.
  
• You value simplicity. Blaise Pascal once wrote, "I'm sorry I wrote you such a long letter; I didn't have time to write a short one." Making things simple and elegant is deceptively difficult, but it’s worth the effort because the result is easier to understand and work with.
  
• You are comfortable thinking about and in tradeoffs. Some decisions will always have a downside. Do we want our distributed database to be more consistent, or more available? Should we use a hosted product that will save us time now, but force us to move to a new system in a year? These are regular conversations!

About Wistia

We work hard to ensure Wistia is an inclusive and diverse place where everyone feels happy, fulfilled, respected, comfortable, and welcome. You can learn more about the type of company we’re building on our blog. Check out our Jobs page to get a feel for our culture and the benefits of working at Wistia.

We want you to grow, contribute, and have fun here! We know the biggest investment we can make is in our employees, so we provide:

• A competitive salary
• 401k with 3% company contribution, regardless of whether you make contributions
• Profit Sharing!
• Flexible hours
• Fully paid healthcare coverage for you and your family (including dental) and a healthcare FSA
• Up to 16 weeks paid family leave
• Flexible vacation and sick leave
• Transportation subsidies
• A convenient office just south of Central Square in Cambridge, MA. We're right on the Red Line, surrounded by great restaurants, parks, and even a dog park