Intermediate Backend Engineer
Published on November 17, 2024
OfferZen is on a mission to improve the experience of finding work for people involved in making software, from developers to designers and data scientists through the utilisation of our world class online recruitment marketplace. We do this by flipping the traditional recruitment model on its head and getting companies to reach out to candidates with upfront offers.
Over the last 6 years, we have managed to make a large dent in the South African online tech recruitment marketplace – and we're speeding up. We have a team of 120+ people with offices in both Cape Town and Amsterdam. At 6 years young, we’re still in an exciting start-up phase which allows us to develop new and exciting ideas, innovate our product, and think creatively about solving real problems.
Mission
OfferZen exists to unlock human potential and support the people who can use tech to make the world a better place. We accomplish this through our talent marketplace which facilitates successful matching between talent (candidates) and opportunities (companies).
The marketplace product squad is responsible for improving the experience and success rate for all participants in our marketplace, as well as enabling our operational teams to provide an excellent service. Working with your team, you will contribute to this mission by delivering impactful and quality software at a high cadence. As a backend engineer, you will work on new and existing features across our backend stack and collaborate with Frontend engineers on our React stack, with an emphasis on maintainable code and providing an awesome user and developer experience.
Responsibilities
- Design, test, and ship great backend code every week to build impactful new features for users.
- Help design and architect backend features with the delivery team.
- Share knowledge with your peers and upskill engineers through code reviews, pair-programming and the internal backend forums.
- Work with a wide range of systems, stakeholders, processes and technologies to own and solve problems from design to delivery.
- Uphold and improve our engineering standards and processes.
- Debug production issues across services, and help ensure a stable application for the marketplace.
- Document feature designs and architectural decisions to support new engineers.
- Contribute to the technical and product roadmap.
Competencies
- Excellent at solving problems that combine product design, process and technical aspects.
- Able to clearly articulate solutions for a technical and non-technical audience.
- Good architectural design ability – understand patterns, algorithm complexity, responsibility separation, component-oriented design, data modelling
- Experience working with an MVC framework in a production environment – E.g. Rails, Laravel, Django, Express.js
- Writing tests to cover all permutations of added functionality.
- Creating documentation for feature designs or architectural choices so that new engineers can quickly start contributing effectively.
- Experience with databases, MongoDB is a bonus.
- Experienced in Backend fundamentals (Automation, Databases, server-side Programming languages, web frameworks, Data access and management, Security).
Background
- 4+ years experience in software development.
- Team player that's used to working in small teams.
- Moves fast while making thoughtful tradeoffs to uphold high-quality standards.
- Driven by finding simple, elegant solutions to hard problems.
- Good communication skills.
- Comfortable working remotely.
- Driven by learning and continuously striving towards self-improvement.
- High confidence, low ego.
- Capable of backing opinions and decisions with data.
- Takes pride in their work.
- Able to balance attention to detail with an understanding of the broader context.
What it's like to work here
We love to do fun stuff together. We are focused on building a connected tribe and a sense of belonging. We value unique and diverse approaches and ensure we create opportunities to share and learn from each other. We have team events, show and tell and a book club.
We're dedicated to authenticity: We treat people as people, caring personally and speaking openly. We foster low-ego behaviour - we own our mistakes as well as our victories. We're never about blame. We're always about honesty, learning and continuous improvement. We ensure lots of transparency and visibility. From OKRs and strategy to analytics and company performance numbers, it's all available for you to see and understand.
We're passionate about learning and levelling up: Everyone at OfferZen strives for a growth mindset and has an annual training budget to use to upskill. We have internal book clubs which include free books, listen to podcasts, share expertise obsessively, and then take on hard challenges with smart guidance and support. When things go wrong, we look for learnings and how to improve.
We're all about balance: We believe that maintaining a healthy balance between home and work is the key to feeling happier and more productive. We work fully remote, provide an annual 'unsick' day to use at your leisure and also offer 24 days of leave a year which is available to use from the time you start.
If this sounds like an exciting opportunity for you, apply below. We look forward to meeting you!
*This role can be based locally or remotely - we welcome all applicants based in South Africa.