Engineering Tech Lead (Ruby), Search & Matching

Are you a technical leader with a knack for data? Do you like to inspire, mentor, and empower engineers to do their best work, while still being hands-on in the code? Does the thought of helping designers around the world find creative and financial independence through freelancing excite you? Read on to learn more about who we are, what we need, and what we can offer you.
 
The Designer Search & Matching team is responsible for key parts of both the customer and designer journey: we help customers explore designers and design on our platform. We strive to match the design needs and criteria from our customers with designers who can deliver the work.
 
We are responsible for designer search ranking, results pages and designer portfolios, as well as the underlying mechanisms to collect the collaboration and activity data from across our design platform that's needed to create great matches.
 
As we aim to take our search and matching algorithms to the next level, a key challenge for us will be to use data to our advantage and rely more on data science to drive decision-making. We know numbers are important, but we'll always put our end-users front-and-center and aim to build authentic, helpful and delightful experiences that deliver real value.
 

As tech lead, you will:

• Be a hands-on leader that owns and drives forward your team's technical vision.
• Partner with product managers, UX specialists, analysts and other product engineering teams to identify, plan, scope and deliver projects on time.
• Mentor 3-4 other engineers on your team and work with them to maximize their impact, ensure they feel engaged and help them progress towards their career goals.
• Make sustainable and high quality technical contributions across the stack, and empower your team to do the same.

You will be a good fit for this role if you have:

• 5+ years commercial full-stack web development experience
• 2+ years hands-on technical management experience
• Commercial experience with Ruby on Rails as well as React or other modern JavaScript frameworks
• Good project management skills; a demonstrated ability to execute and coordinate software development projects with multiple dependencies across teams
• Strong verbal and written communication skills; you've shown to effectively communicate technical issues and recommend solutions to different levels of the business
• Excellent interpersonal skills, demonstrated by your ability to develop and manage effective working relationships.
• Experience working iteratively or following an agile methodology.

You will be an even better fit if you have: 

• Expertise in statistical data analysis and/or machine learning
• Demonstrated product, business and/or UX sensibilities
• Experience working with remote teams and stakeholders
• Experience with AWS, Docker and infrastructure as code
• Experience with TypeScript, GraphQL and Apollo
• Experience with Golang, or eager to learn

A bit about us...

99designs is the world’s global creative platform that makes it easier for customers and designers to work together to create designs they love. Our mission is to champion creativity to create opportunities for people around the world. Founded in 2008, 99designs has grown from a small, online forum into a worldwide community of talented designers that is now the go-to solution for businesses, agencies and individuals.

Backed by Accel Partners (who have also invested in Facebook, Slack, and Dropbox) and Recruit Strategic Partners, 99designs is a dynamic company with offices in Oakland, Melbourne, and Berlin. We’re a global team that benefits from bringing together the experiences and viewpoints of a wide range of talented folk around the world.

At 99designs we care deeply about diversity and inclusion. We welcome applicants of all types, from all backgrounds that have the skills and experience we're looking for because we know our ability to design and create products for all our customers is largely a sum of the diversity and empathy of our team. We can be flexible with exact skill sets of each candidate, we're more interested in positive attitudes than algorithms.

We encourage our engineers to help us find new ways to improve our product. We care about quality and strive to keep our systems modular and our code clean. We constantly refine our processes and tools with the aim to make developers happy, efficient and able to focus on building great products. We love shipping, continuous delivery is in our DNA; anyone on the team can deploy to production, and we do so many times a day.

We love our employees and go to great lengths to make sure they know it! Perks include: a well-stocked kitchen for breakfast, lunch, and snacks, free weekly lunches, happy hours, an active ping pong table and more!

Some additional benefits you'll enjoy at 99designs are:

• Easy access to public transportation (5 minute walk from 19th Street BART)
• Flexible working hours and the opportunity to work from home when needed
• Up to 20 days of paid leave annually
• Paid parental leave
• Stock options
• Continual training and learning, conference attendance, in-house mentoring and bi-weekly R&D days
• Health and wellness programs like fully-paid health insurance, free local gym membership, and quiet work spaces
• Opportunities for travel to Australia, where most of our engineers are located
• An industrial-strength coffee machine