Follain leads the movement toward healthier personal care by curating only the best (healthy, proven, pure, pleasing) products on follain.com and in a growing number of stores across the country. Together we’re making widespread change in the wildly unregulated and unhealthy beauty industry. We’re currently building a whole new Follain experience – online and in-stores. Want to be part of our mission to change the world?

Do you enjoy building smart, scalable application ecosystems that leverage the best technologies for disparate functionalities? Creating and maintaining flexible data models that power real-time business intelligence and automation? Working collaboratively across functional groups to stay in touch with the challenges you’re working to solve for customers and internal stakeholders?

We’re looking for an experienced, proficient engineer and team leader who shares these passions and can bring their own insights and experience to our quickly growing company.

As VP of Engineering at Follain, you will work on projects and applications that touch all aspects of our business. Your responsibilities will include leading the vision and evolution of the platform as our company grows and scales quickly while also bringing to life best-in-class digital customer experience. By implementing API caching mechanisms, well-thought-out libraries, extensible schemas and data models, and performant analytics tooling, you will enable the Front-End developers to iterate rapidly. You will help provide the framework they need to stay focused on creating a beautiful, fast UI.

With your knowledge of the full ecosystem and the interrelated nature of each microservice, you will be an important source of communication between teams and enable us to build and maintain the technology assets to position Follain as the authority and go-to source for clean beauty at a national level. 

Responsibilities

• Systems architecture with a focus on backend, middleware, and data modeling
• Ongoing engineering and development contribution to all applications with a focus on backend and middleware systems and application deployments and oversight
• Performance monitoring and optimization
• Customization of frameworks, packages, and plugins
• Component consistency and re-use
• Systems administration, environment configuration, security oversight
• Code review and feedback to contributing team members with a focus on growing the skills of junior members
• Working closely with the project management team to provide engineering perspective on feature specification, feasibility, and time estimations

Requirements

• 8+ years experience in engineering and software development, with recent experience in a leadership role
• 4+ years of experience in Ruby on Rails
• 4+ years of experience in Node
• 2+ years of experience with GraphQL
• 2+ years of experience with React (Redux)
• A passion for writing great code and the ability to move easily between high-level architectural design/review and the hands-on work necessary to make it happen
• Experience with designing consistent and re-usable components
• Experience with automated testing and QA
• Experience with performance optimization
• Experience with data modeling and architecture to power visualization and BI
• Strong problem solving skills
• Openness to new concepts, ideas, and languages
• Ability to work in a team environment at a fast-paced, early-stage, growing company
• Familiarity with continuous integration development
• Experienced and comfortable with agile development methodologies
• Based in Boston, MA and available to work on-site daily
• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or commensurate experience
• E-commerce experience strongly preferred

Some of what we currently use

• Ruby on Rails
• React, Redux, Webpack
• Solidus
• Looker (LookML)
• GraphQL API (Apollo, Weaver)
• Postgres
• DBT
• Redis/PubSub
• Contentful
• Cangaroo
• GitHub
• Heroku

Your first few weeks

• You’ll familiarize yourself with our architecture, supporting microservices, data models, and development team and methodologies (consistency, maintainability, performance, re-use)
• Begin reviewing and contributing to development across the stack to understand the role each segment plays and identify opportunities for improvements and efficiencies we might apply in the future
• Get up to speed quickly with our GraphQL API such that you can be primary contributor and innovator to that component of our stack
• Socialize and form relationships with all team contributors so you can eventually serve as a trusted intermediary and leader