Senior Product Engineer

About Ockam

Build for Builders. Ockam is a suite of open source tools, programming libraries, and managed cloud services to orchestrate end-to-end encryption, mutual authentication, key management, credential management, and authorization policy enforcement – at massive scale.

We are devoted to building a team of people with diverse backgrounds and lifestyles. We hire globally and believe that the unique perspectives and contributions of all our team members is the driver of our success.

Driving equality empowers our team, enables us to innovate, and helps us maintain a more inclusive environment. We don’t discriminate against anyone based on gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, religion, age, race, military/veteran status, citizenship, pregnancy status, or any other differences. If we can do anything to provide a better interview, i.e. accommodate a disability, then please let us know.

Ockam is a distributed, remote-first team with a headquarters in San Francisco California.

The Position

We are seeking a talented Senior Product Engineer with experience building simple, clean, and elegant developer experiences; including APIs, open source libraries, documentation, user guides, and demos in the open source developer ecosystem.

This is an exciting role where you will work at the intersection of our open source community, customers, and the Ockam product development teams.

This role is highly technical and very hands-on given the technical aspects of Ockam's product and the use cases we encounter. You should be able to write code in multiple languages and have a keen interest in Rust and open source library design - this is a great opportunity to jump into the Rust ecosystem in earnest!

Requirements

Expertise

• Building technical demos in multiple languages.
• Writing and curating technical documentation.
• Website user experience design.
• Documentation library design.
• Open Source ecosystem best practices

Experience

• A senior level role at an OSS dev tool company.
• At least 8 years of engineering experience with in backend and infrastructure systems.
• Building user journeys and experiences.

Not sure you meet 100% of our qualifications? Please apply anyway!

Our Hiring Process

We attempt to complete the entire process with a candidate within two weeks. Because Ockam is a remote first company the entire process will take place over video calls and through asynchronous collaborations in Google Docs, Github and email.

Our interview process consists of three parts - Hiring Screen, Starter Project, and a Culture Conversation.

Hiring Screen

The hiring manager for the role will reach out to you via email and schedule a 45-60 minute call.

The purpose of this call is to understand if and how you could fit into the team. Help us with this process by giving relevant background about your experiences and interests. If we have a hypothesis for how you could fit into a full time role we will proceed to the second round.

You should be prepared to discuss the following:

• What interests you about Ockam and what inspired you to apply for this role?
• Have you tried creating a trusted connection to see how Ockam works (https://github.com/build-trust/ockam#get-started)?
• Why do you want to work at an early stage, 'Silicon Valley' startup?
• What do you think about Ockam's High Performance Team culture, based on this video (https://www.ockam.io/blog/high_performance_team)
• What level (https://www.ockam.io/blog/levels_ladder) do you think you are? Can you cite examples from your previous work that aligns with specific qualities in our levels guide?
• Tell us about the hardest engineering problem that you've ever had to solve.
• Tell us about a time when you went above and beyond helping out a coworker.

OSS Starter Project

If we ask you to move to this round, we have a strong thesis for your potential on The Team.

We will introduce you to a small project to work on, this will be a relevant issue to our team and codebase. The output to this project will be in the form of a pull request or a writeup in a Google Doc. We will then schedule a Starter Project interview in which you'll talk about the problem you're solving for, your thought process and approach to the solution, we'll have a healthy discussion about it and possibly also ask you questions about your background and experiences that are relevant to the topic of the Starter Project.

There are two primary goals in this exercise.

1. We want to assess your ability to digest a problem, explore solutions, and deliver a solution. We are equally interested in how you engage with the Ockam team and our published resources, as we are about your solution.
2. The exercise is designed to give you insight into the Ockam Code and The Team. You will get to meet our CTO, Mrinal Wadhwa during the Starter Project interview discussion, be able to challenge assumptions, and to ask questions. We know that moving to a new team is a big decision and we want to make sure we give you as much data as possible to facilitate your decision. A real project with our actual team is the best way to accomplish this goal.

Culture Connection

As you wrap up your OSS collaboration exercise you will spend time discussing the Ockam culture, and our values and virtues with our CEO, Matthew Gregory. In this stage of our process we want to expose as much of the culture to you as possible to help you make an informed decision about the type of team you will be committing full time to.

Prior to this stage in the interview process you should be familiar with how Ockam defines a High Performance Team. Be prepared to talk about specific examples where you felt like you were (or were not) on a High Performance Team. Also share stories about how you have put your team first and empowered others to be their best selves.

Benefits

• Retirement benefits. Generous 401(k) with matching to help you invest in your future.
• Healthcare benefits. Health care coverage.