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Staff Engineer – Platform

Melbourne

How can I make a big impact in engineering leadership at scale… without managing people? Well, you might just like to consider a Staff Engineering role dear reader. They are both blue-sky thinkers, able to “zoom out” and holistically take the bigger picture + future states into account, as well as being down in the technical detail and able to “zoom-in” to solve specific problems and complexities. They are the connectors of product & engineering strategy, and love to empower other engineers along their way. If reading that gets you excited – then we might have *just* the role for you to join the Platform group’s leadership team at 99designs.

99designs by Vista is the world’s global creative platform that makes it easy for clients and designers to work together to create designs they love. Since 2008, their freelance community has brought more than one million creative projects to life for thousands of genius entrepreneurs, savvy small business owners, and brands with big ideas. As part of the Vista family, which includes VistaPrint and VistaCreate, 99designs helps small businesses thrive with expert design at their fingertips.

Why join now? You’d be joining a high calibre and mature product tech business that’s small enough for you to have real impact.

Working in the Platform group you’re at the very heart of 99designs mission – this is the group that builds the foundational products, software, infrastructure and tools that every team relies upon. Their ethos is all about empowering and enabling other 99ers to do their best work yet & to deliver even faster customer value. 

Everyone in this space is a bit of an end-to-end ‘platforms’ thinker — there are other software engineers, product folks, data specialists, site reliability and cloud engineers, all united in their desire to unpack, refine & improve end user experiences (be they customer, creator, partner, 99er, or even user experiences beyond that & in the broader Vista-verse). What’s exciting about this space is the impact, there are so many interesting problems to solve, all of which have immediate and tangible impact. 

As a Staff Engineer, you are part of the Platform group’s leadership team, providing the technical vision, helping to shape technical direction/roadmap, and ultimately creating a thriving engineering culture. You will act as both an architect — establishing and maintaining architecture governance practices within the group, and as a solver — jumping into high-value complex problems. From time to time you may also play the role of a tech lead and/or a right hand for the group. There’s a good bit of ambiguity at this level, but you’ll take satisfaction from clarifying the ‘unknowns’ & providing high-level technical support across your group, reducing the complexity to create tangible scopes of work for all of the teams to jump into (and be successful). 

You’ll teach, mentor and GROW the next gen of 99er’s into better & bolder engineers. You will establish and advocate for better practices + ways of working across the business, be it through thought leadership, building out training, or even just through being a role model within 99d as an individual contributor yourself. You collaborate closely with other engineers, leadership, and product, all whilst contributing to the overarching engineering strategy and tech radar across the business. Occasionally you may work hands-on alongside the team to deliver work, but for the most part you play a leadership & strategic role, leading the creation of their playbooks. 

The techy bits
The 99designs platform consists of a fleet of microservices written in Go with a GraphQL backend-for-frontend aggregation layer and a Typescript/Javascript React frontend. There’s also a bit of Ruby and PHP in there too.

99designs is an early AWS customer, and has been early adopters of Docker, ECS and most recently Fargate as the hosting platform of choice. Supporting the developers in their ability to ship multiple times a day is a large body of Docker based tooling, Buildkite for continuous deployment and DataDog for observability.

Every team is fullstack and looks after an end-to-end, vertical slice of the 99designs by Vista product. This means that you own part of the front-end, back-end, storage, and operations – the goal is for teams to be in control of delivering a great end-user experience. 

A little bit about you

• Commercial experience with any web development language – theirs are Golang, JavaScript, TypeScript, Ruby, PHP, and React, but we’re open to hear from web developers with any tech stack!
• Solid understanding of AWS, Docker, and infrastructure as code.
• Track record of technical leadership at the team level and department wide advocacy — resulting in positive change across the organization.
• Ability to execute and coordinate Engineering projects that span multiple sprints and involve multiple contributors.
• Strong communication skills across both different levels and parts of the business, with the ability to develop and manage effective working relationships with a variety of stakeholders based in trust & respect.
• A fundamental passion for mentoring, teaching, and helping others.

Why 99designs by Vista?
As 99designs continues to scale as part of the Vista family, they are committed to building an inclusive and diverse team that reflects the communities in which they operate. They want people to feel like they belong and can bring their whole selves to work. Their aim is to continue to foster a collaborative environment with a keen focus on innovation, growth and ownership. Below are just some of the things that they do to support their people:
  

• Career development and learning in whatever way suits you. Think: fortnightly paid R&D days, courses, formal and informal mentoring, conferences… however you learn best 99d has got you covered!
• Grow your technical chops. On the job training & development in emerging industry standards such as Go and GraphQL.
• Culture of workplace flexibility. Everyone has unique needs and lives and 99d  will support you in the best way that they can. Some people might work remotely, some with flex start and finish times… the common thread is it’s all about your individual needs. You’ll be set up at home with an Apple laptop, monitor, desk, chair, headphones etc. (the works), plus annually refreshing your WFH space with $300, to do your thang.
• Wellness for everyone. 99d are big on wellbeing & empowering every 99er to flourish. With annual wellness bonuses of $605 (to spend as you wish), 5x “wag” days of leave a year to take time off look after yourself + your wellbeing, access to their EAP Uprise for mindfulness, coaching & counselling, weekly online pilates & yoga classes, and a private wellness room in the office for prayer, pumping, finding a quiet moment or whatever + whenever else you might need some privacy.  
• Support for working parents. 18 weeks paid parental leave policy for all parents (they don’t distinguish between a primary and secondary carer), which can be accessed part time or any way you want it over the first 18 months, which you can access from day 1 of joining them. They also pay superannuation for paid and unpaid parental leave for 18months!
• Support for the community. In addition to 99nonprofits, 99d provides one paid volunteer day a year for you to support a charity and the community as you see fit (they also match all staff donations to charities and nonprofits dollar for dollar!) Everyone also has 3 additional days of cultural leave a year. 99d are also a Proud Code Like a Girl Gold Partner & maintain popular open source projects, and support a range of other community groups. It’s in their DNA.

Just a little bit curious?! Let’s have a chat to see if this can be your happy (work) place.

Kushla Egan
[email protected]

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