Principal Engineer
Drops, Estonia
Job Description
Type: Remote, permanent, full-time position
Do you have a soft spot for profitable companies with a meaningful, globally used and loved product? Would you like to work within a compact, super-capable team in a refreshing work environment? Would you like to work on an application that is changing the way we learn and communicate? Drops could be the place for you.
About us:
Our goal at Drops is to ensure effective language learning through a delightful, seamless, gamified experience. We strive to be the #1 app for vocabulary learning. Our app has been live on the App Store for 4 years, covering 43 languages, serving over 30 million users across the globe and has been featured on both the App Store (App of the Day) and Play Store (App of the Year in 2018). Drops has also been featured by TechCrunch, FastCo, Forbes, CNN, Bloomberg, VentureBeat and many, many more. In short, we’re a tiny but very powerful team spread (mostly) across Europe, achieving great things the remote way! In December 2020, Drops was acquired by Kahoot!, the world’s leading game-based learning platform
Check us out here: https://languagedrops.com
Requirements
About you:
You’ve been working within high growth product companies for some time now and have extensive engineering experience. Perhaps you were an early key team member that nursed a startup to technical success or you hit the ground running in an already successful startup and took them to the next engineering level!
You’re a no-nonsense person who’s comfortable implementing projects across the tech stack and have worked in tech leadership roles perhaps as a technical lead or a principal engineer. You’ve got a solid understanding of full stack development, comfortable working within the backend and ops tooling but also writing frontend code for both the browser and mobile client. You enjoy the challenge of solving internal technology hurdles while growing a product with millions of MAU.
You believe variety is the spice of life - In this role, you’ll be developing a complex app deployable to web and app stores, building internal automation infrastructure/tooling and working on dynamic language dictionaries. You’ll also be working on our fully serverless architecture from feature development to keeping our build times down and our availability in the 5 9’s category.
Drops is a deliberately small, but super effective team. You’re naturally drawn to the fate of the products amp; driven to grow as an engineer rather than to manage people.
The role:
You’ll be a core part of the development team, working on both our main products (Drops, Droplets, Scripts amp; Visual Dictionary) and internal development challenges. This role isn’t about writing 10x more code or closing all the tech debt tickets possible, it’s about being a force multiplier, improving efficiency in the tooling, engineering team and product. You’ll be the grease between the engineering cogs!
You will:
- Support of the production applications be it through feature development, bug fixing or scaling infrastructure/ops work
- Work with the CTO on the technical roadmap, vision and hands on work within areas of improvement
- Communicate effectively to ensure that everyone is aligned with technical best practices and trends
- Assist in levelling up our engineers through individual talent development pipelines and recruitment drives
What’d be different here:
- We’re a small team. We’re optimising for impact, not for headcount. You’ll be carefully considering any tradeoff that would lead to increased complexity
- We have strict linter rules and every pull request needs to be approved before it lands in master. We use the rebase workflow and we release a few times a week
- We’re currently using a single programming language - TypeScript. There are however better placed technology for different jobs which we’d love explore
- We’re using React + Redux to develop UI, on both mobile and the web and use selectors extensively
- Our backend is AWS, deployed multi-region to Lambda and using RDS for our DB. We use Buildkite and Bitrise for our CI
- We are BIG on AB testing. We focus on releasing high impact projects and minimise noise
- We’re doing things in a functional way, concentrating state, minimising side effects and making dependencies explicit. We’re sharing 98%+ of the code between Android, iOS and Web
- Our biggest challenge is (and will remain) managing the complexity of sharing a lot of code between different apps
You have:
- Extensive experience in software/product development within leadership roles
- Experience building apps in a functional environment (React/Native and serverless)
- Experience architecting and developing complex web or mobile apps
- Experienc