Staff Software Engineer, Core Product

Wistia is looking for a Staff Engineer to join our team! This role is a great leadership opportunity within our Core Product group to guide the development of major initiatives. Along with driving product development, Staff Engineers at Wistia create a multiplying effect within their team through mentorship, coaching, and shaping our overall technology strategy.

You’ll work primarily in our modern tech stack with React, ES6, GraphQL, and Ruby while building on our collection of platform services.

Here are some examples of what you might focus on:

• Creating a world-class media library experience with seamless uploading and organization tools.
• Building lighting-fast and accurate search capabilities.
• Expanding our UI component library based on React and styled-components.
• Providing customers with innovative tools to launch their content to millions of viewers and analyze performance.
• Directly impacting the growth of a major SaaS product that tens of thousands of businesses depend on every day.

We’re a diverse and inclusive team composed of engineers, product managers, and designers. We’re technology-minded, but customer-focused, always aiming to deliver the highest-impact features that prioritize the long-term success of the product.

Key Responsibilities

• Collaborate cross-functionally (primarily with research, design, and product) to understand the needs of the customer and deliver a simple and easy-to-use solution.
• Act as the technical lead for complex projects that span multiple teams, systems, and functions.
• Coordinate and provide guidance to a group of engineers. Direct all aspects of delivery, from early planning through release strategy.
• Help shape our long-term technology strategy and foster an inclusive culture for making architectural decisions.
• Play an active role in growing the team and developing talent.
• Work comfortably across front-end and back-end development. We mainly use Ruby and React, but we are not wedded to them, nor do we expect engineers coming in to know our particular frameworks.

Qualifications

• You have experience operating in a leadership capacity and taking ownership of large engineering projects. You’ve shipped major product initiatives that provided significant value to customers.
• You’re an expert in the domain of building production web applications with high standards for performance, scalability, and user experience.
• You are a collaborator. Whether through pair programming, a whiteboard session, or a casual lunch conversation, collaboration helps the best ideas and practices to proliferate.
• You have strong communication skills. Each of us has only part of the overall picture in our head at a given time. Explaining ideas at an understandable level of abstraction is critical to achieving a shared vision.
• You're empathetic and emotionally intelligent. Sometimes things don't go smoothly. A customer gets frustrated, or a coworker does something that bothers you. Understanding where others are coming from, and being in control of and deliberate about how you respond to them, empowers you to solve problems while also being supportive of and sensitive to those around you.
• You write clean and understandable code. We write code for each other and for our future selves. Code that is clear and tested sets us up for speed, reliability, and a more enjoyable development experience.
• You know your fundamentals. Fads and frameworks come and go. We’re less worried that you know the Next Hot Thing™ than that you feel comfortable with the underlying data structures, algorithms, languages, and protocols that make web applications work.
• You are comfortable thinking about trade-offs. Some decisions will always have a downside. Do we want our distributed database to be more consistent, or more available? Should we use a hosted product that will save us time now, but force us to move to a new system in a year? These are regular conversations!
• You value simplicity. Blaise Pascal once wrote, "I'm sorry I wrote you such a long letter; I didn't have time to write a short one." Making things simple and elegant is deceptively difficult, but it’s worth the effort because the result is easier to understand and work with.

About Wistia

We try to ensure Wistia is an inclusive and diverse place where everyone feels happy, fulfilled, respected, comfortable, and welcome. We’re proud to be an equal opportunity workplace. We care a lot, so our benefits are actually benefits, not just the fun stuff like swag and snacks in the office (though we also have lots of those too!).

We know the biggest investment we can make is in our employees, so we provide:

• A great compensation package
• 401k with 3% company contribution, regardless of whether you contribute
• Profit sharing!
• Flexible hours
• Fully paid healthcare coverage for you and your family (including dental) and a healthcare FSA
• 16 weeks paid family leave
• Flexible vacation and sick leave
• Transportation subsidies

Location/Remote Opportunities

Wistia is a hybrid in-person/remote company. Engineers can work from our beautiful office in Cambridge, MA, or anywhere in the continental US.