Staff/Lead Software Engineer - Web Growth

About Blinkist

We offer the best selection of non-fiction knowledge in bite-sized, digestible formats. Our catalogue gives access to key insights from 5,000+ nonfiction books, original podcasts and author-driven content across 27 categories.

Blinkist exists to spark understanding.✨ We're helping people enrich their minds with powerful ideas, and turn ordinary moments into extraordinary learning opportunities—anytime, anywhere.

Our unique culture of empowerment, mutual respect, and transparency has always been our defining characteristic. We support each other and carve out opportunities for every individual to develop and grow. We strongly believe that diversity powers innovation, thus we celebrate and support our differences, providing equal opportunities for employment and career growth. We embrace a flexible, remote-friendly way of working that supports different needs and lifestyles.

🌟 We are proud to have been selected by LinkedIn as one of the Top 25 Startups in Germany. Glassdoor and Kununu ratings put us amongst Berlin’s top three employers.

The Position

At Blinkist, our Web teams enable the Web platform by bringing our trove of content to life, working closely with stakeholders in Marketing, Content, Product, and Engineering. The Web platform is a primary contributor to the company’s growth. In addition to achieving ambitious growth goals through SEO, our plans for 2023 involve empowering our Marketing and Content teams to easily create and manage content and reevaluating our tech stack to enable more efficient development, bringing in technologies such as HyGraph and GraphQL.

We’re looking for an experienced Staff Engineer/Tech Lead to drive impact in our Web teams. You'll use your expertise and passion to multiply the output of the teams. You’ll own our platform and influence projects across the organization, providing technical leadership and mentorship while fostering a culture of collaboration and bias for action. You'll be hands-on in the code and a go-to sparring partner for developers, designers, product managers, and engineering leadership in their day-to-day.

What You Will Do

• Contribute to one of our top company priorities this year: scale Web by cracking organic growth through SEO
• Shape the long-term technical landscape of Web at Blinkist, providing technical guidance across different projects and advising stakeholders on technical topics
• Work day to day alongside product and design in iterative planning, implementation, and improvement and be a key sparring partner for them
• Develop and deploy high quality code, taking ownership of our Web platform. Our current stack: Vue, Nuxt, Ruby on Rails, AWS
• Empower engineers towards our technical vision through mentorship and leadership

If you choose to join our team in Berlin, you'll have access to our modern office space in Neukölln and enjoy healthy plant-based meals prepared fresh every day by our very own chef. 🥑

Requirements

What You Need To Have

• You have 8+ years experience developing web applications across the stack
• You have deep technical knowledge of modern frontend development and modern JavaScript, including a high degree of automated testing
• You have deep experience building scalable software end-to-end, including architecture design, implementation across the stack, deployment, and monitoring
• You have a track record of navigating ambiguity and complexity across different projects
• You are proficient in English and can effectively communicate and document complex information and facilitate decision-making with stakeholders from Product, Engineering, Design, and Marketing\

Bonus

• You have prior experience as a technical lead and a track record of mentoring engineers and helping deepen their technical craft
• You have experience with GraphQL and content management systems
• You have experience with SEO and SEM
• You have prior experience as technical lead or mentor

Our Hiring Process

All interviews are done remotely via Zoom. Please refer to your email invitation and calendar for the meeting link and further details.

1️⃣ Hiring Manager Interview

• ⏰ Duration: 30 min
• In this initial conversation, we’ll align on the role and see if there’s a potential fit. You’ll hear about our team, mission, and vision and we’ll learn more about your technical experience and professional ambitions.

2️⃣ Work on a Coding Challenge

• ⏰ Time investment: about 2h
• The team has prepared an exciting take-home challenge for you.
• It should showcase your approach to common day to day challenges of your role at Blinkist. We can't wait to share it with you!

3️⃣ In-Depth Interview

• ⏰ Duration: 60 min
• We’d love to discuss your ideas , learn a bit more about your approach and review your solution with your future teammates. You will go through your code and answer some questions on your solution. 🙂

4️⃣ Remote Day at Blinkist

• ⏰ Time investment: 3-4h
• Your remote Day with Blinkist will give you a feel for what it's like to work with us. Over the course of this final round, you'll meet and spend time with various stakeholders. This will be a great chance to ask any final question about working at Blinkist.
• We’ll share more details around the agenda for the day and the interview panel ahead of time. 💫

We sincerely hope this will also be a great opportunity for you to see exactly how we work and learn whether Blinkist is a great next step for you.

We understand how valuable the feedback can be for your development and growth. We are happy to provide you with specific interview feedback upon request following the technical assessment and later stages of the process.

Benefits

• 30 vacation days + local public holidays in your place of work
• Virtual stock options plan
• Quarterly days of learning and wellbeing
• An extra day off for you birthday
• Unlimited home-office with a monthly workspace allowance
• Learning & development budget
• Coaching budget for minorities and mothers returning from their leave
• Physical and mental health support through various partners
• Relocation and visa support for Germany