Tech Lead
Who we are
BookBub is one of the fastest-growing (and profitable!) consumer tech startups in Boston. 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 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. We believe our team is strongest if we aren’t over-specialized, so most tech leads will rotate to new teams over time.
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:
* Partner with a product leader to define a product backlog * 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
* Mentor one to four 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
* Build, launch and test several significant new book discovery features
* Write lots of integration and unit tests (no separate QA team here)
* Be heads down coding 80% 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 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:
* Smart, friendly, collaborative, and intellectually curious software engineers * Engineers who love to learn and teach, to be both mentors and mentees
* Experience having lead a team formally or informally
* Good judgement on making technical tradeoffs
* Want to go fast, but at a sustainable pace -- we're building a business with long-term value
* People who have in-depth experience with a modern stack
* Distributed systems and high scale experience are a big plus, but not required
Benefits
BookBub offers competitive benefit options including medical, dental, vision, 401k, and take-what-you-need PTO. 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.