Lead Software Engineer (Remote)

Job Description

Collage.com’s mission is to make custom products easy for everyone. We strive to do this by providing superior software and excellent customer service. We sell an expanding variety of photo and home products, including photo blankets, photo books, canvases, pillows, and more. Our company has been featured on the TODAY Show , The View , and Good Morning America many times. We are a 100% employee-owned company that has rapidly grown to 40 employees and $25M annual revenue over the past five years.

As a 100% remote company , we are set up to provide the best possible environment for engineering. The less time developers spend dealing with cumbersome processes, inefficient systems, and commuting, the more time they have to solve problems and make an impact. Collage.com’s co-founders/co-CEOs both come from a technical background and believe in staying at the forefront of best practices so that we can focus on work that matters. We pass almost all of The Joel Test (we only fix high-priority bugs before writing new code, but hey, we’re a start-up), use continuous deployment (code goes straight to production after each merge), and are in the process of adopting mobx-state-tree with React . Strong engineering is a key part of our business strategy -- it lets us build best-in-class design tools faster than our larger competitors.

We are seeking an ambitious and nice lead software engineer who shares our passion for building a great software company. This is a unique opportunity to have a major impact on our engineering team’s growth (we are about ten strong right now) by helping us continually raise the bar. You will be expected to collaborate with other engineers to solve complex technical problems and push us to deliver higher quality code at an ever-increasing rate. We firmly believe in the power of solid architecture, code design, and simplicity over brute force, which is why we do our best to hire 10x senior engineers. If you are seeking an environment where you get to do meaningful work with other great engineers, then we want to hear from you.

Learn more about working and developing software at Collage.com .

Responsibilities

• Write and maintain front-end JavaScript code as part of a mobile-first web application, including UI components and state management logic, as well as back-end PHP and front-end network communication code (back end is approximately 10% of work).
• Make decisions about code design, architecture, and refactoring to balance technical debt against delivering functionality.
• Plan and lead testing for complex projects.
• Review code and mentor other engineers.
• Provide time estimates and participate in agile development.
• Review specifications and work with PMs to implement lean methodology.

Required Qualifications

• 5+ years professional application development experience
• Experience implementing and testing advanced JavaScript code on a team as part of a production web or mobile application
• Practical experience with MV* architecture (such as Backbone, Vue, React + Redux/Mobx, etc.), unidirectional data flow, and minimal class/object interfaces
• Spatial/geometric reasoning ability -- for rendering, animation, and image manipulation
• Ability to quickly understand and work with unfamiliar complex code
• Pro-active and clear communication is essential for this remote work position

Benefits and Perks

• Working from home makes it easier to focus on results and develop professionally while spending less time commuting. ( See our opinion piece on perks and work-life balance at mlive.com. )
• 401(k) plan, home internet reimbursement, and $3,000 / year in free Collage.com products plus employee discount for friends and family.
• Collage.com pays 100% of the premium for full health, vision and dental insurance coverage for you and your family in a high-quality Blue Cross Blue Shield PPO plan.
• Flexible work schedule and unlimited vacation policy (work hard and take time when you need it).
• We’ll pay for any computer and home office equipment (within reason) that will help you work better.

The Interview Process

The goal of our interview process is to identify people who will be a good fit for our company and are talented, ambitious engineers. Because you will be working remotely, all of our interviews are done over the phone in close succession to move through the process quickly. We look for candidates with good written and verbal communication skills.

We ask all candidates to demonstrate strong coding ability at the beginning of our interview process. The questions are in Javascript and focus on applying general programming concepts (like concurrency and good code structure) in realistic scenarios that should be familiar to experienced engineers. We do not test for knowledge of esoteric language features, APIs, or algorithms. We prefer engineers who are smart and able to learn over those who are familiar with our exact tech stack.

During the interview process, you will talk to other engineers, your future manager, a product manager, and both founders/CEOs of the company. We believe in transparency, and will give you the opportunity to speak with anyone else you’d like to meet before accepting an offer. You are making an important decision, and we want to make sure you are fully committed to joining our team.