Talarian is a small, growing, and profitable software company that is building the future of spreadsheet-driven business applications. Our main products are YAMM, Awesome Table, and Form Publisher. They are used and loved by millions and some of the most popular products in the Google Workspace marketplace.
Our company is around 30 people, remote-first and global (we have people based in Western and Eastern Europe, Philippines, Nigeria), all highly motivated and dedicated.
Our product values are: simplicity, empowerment, and getting out of the way.
We are hiring a highly motivated Senior Technical Lead/CTO who will take ownership of the technical strategy and execution of a product development, with the possibility to enlarge the scope to more products after some time. This is both a leadership and hands-on role: you will have to get your hands dirty at times and dig in code.
- They are global-scale products, used in every kind of organization, by millions of people who speak different languages, have varying accessibility requirements, and wildly differing hardware/network
- The products share many capabilities and are made of many different subsystems, which poses coordination challenges
- The products are built on serverless components allowing them to scale nicely
- Building on top of Google means building on top of a fast-evolving platform. They push us forward, and we must keep up
- We are currently in the process of refactoring core parts of the infrastructure in depth in order to allow for our next big projects, and there are many interesting architecture and engineering decisions to be made
Our products are typically made of the following subproducts:
- A Google Workspace add-on which is a small real-estate web-app integrated with Google Sheets/Forms. This is where the bulk of the functionality is exposed to users.
- A typical dashboard front-end, which contains administration and analytics.
- A business logic back-end
- A payments and billing back-end
- A logging and analytics pipeline
- A marketing website
Our product infrastructure is hosted on Google Cloud Platform:
- We run logic on App Engine, Cloud Functions, Cloud Pub Sub, Cloud Storage
- We store data in Firebase, PostgreSQL, Redis, BigQuery
- We use Sonarcloud, Sentry and Lambdatest as code quality tools
We code in TypeScript (React), Google Apps Script, NodeJS and Java. We’re keen to introduce a new strong back-end language such as Golang in our stack.
Our marketing websites are coded in NextJS and hosted on Vercel.
- Taking full responsibility of a product from an infrastructure, architecture, code, run and build perspective
- Leading, mentoring and growing the technical team
- Owning the planning, staffing and release process
- Writing technical and architecture specs
- Improving team development processes and productivity
- Providing measurable and scalable engineering support processes
- Each product team is currently composed of 2-4 developers, 1 QA and 1 QA Automation, and 1 designer.
- We do not use any agile frameworks as we have found them not to be agile at all. We instead carve out projects that should last between two to six weeks, and meet daily for 5-15 minutes to discuss our progress and reevaluate priorities if need be. We hold a longer (~1h) meeting per week to plan the week ahead.
- Short-term tasks are tracked on a very simple Gantt chart in a Google Sheet and specifications are written in Google Docs.
- Developers use Jira to create and track tickets. We use Github and pull requests for version control. We use Github Actions for continuous deployment with automated tests.
- Communication with the wider team is done through email, Google Docs, a little bit of Slack and Google Meet.
- You have extensive architecture and coding experience
- You care more about making reliable software used by many than a shiny unstable thing used by no one. You understand that engineering work is done first and foremost for the customers.
- You care a lot about performance, understand that speed is a core feature
- Fully capable of architecting, owning and running entire systems (new add-on, new billing system, new api, new webapp, new integration)
- Deep, substantial expertise in multiple programming environments and databases
- You understand people, and can provide material feedback on the work of programmers
- You’re a very strong communicator, both written and verbal
- Experience: 6+ years as a professional programmer and 3+ years in a tech lead or engineering manager role, preferably on a large scale product
- Cloud: you have deep experience with one of the 3 main cloud platforms. Bonus points for GCP and serverless experience
- Programming ecosystems: you have experience with many programming languages, including Java.
- Software engineering tools: you’re familiar with build, profiling and code quality tools
- Language: excellent in English, both written and oral
- Writing: you enjoy writing, you care about words and grammar
- The range for this role is EUR 90k-130k, depending on experience and type of contract
- 30 days of paid time off
- Medical, dental and vision insurance (depending on the type of contract)
- Paid parental leave
We want to get a sense of how you write and think. To that end, please write an email that covers at least the following:
- Show us some technical specs you’ve written that you’re proud of if possible
- Tell us about something you’ve built in the past, what where the tradeoffs, the challenges, and how you made your technology choices
- Tell us what you’re excited about in software engineering these days
- Tell us why you want this job
We value great writers, so please show off those skills (stock cover letters won’t do). Send your email and resume, plus any public profile or material you feel relevant to [email protected]
- We will first ask you a few targeted questions to be answered by email so as to get acquainted with you in writing.
- If that goes well, we’ll send you a technical test.
- You’ll then move on to an interview with a Lead Engineer
- Finally, an interview with the CTO.
We can’t wait to hear from you!