Senior Software Engineer (Full Stack)

Simple Poll

Full Time – Remote

About Simple Poll

• Simple Poll brings polls and surveys natively into Slack. Learn more about the product on https://simplepoll.rocks
• Wilhelm created Simple Poll in early 2016 to improve his own workflow when working in Slack. Started as a side project and then grew up to be a real company!
• Simple Poll is one of the most popular apps for Slack and over the course of a year serves millions of users. As a member of the engineering team, you will be able to directly impact the experience of all of those users.
• We are a fairly early stage company with a small and growing team. We're profitable, bootstrapped (no external investment) and very much plan to stay that way!

Because we’re such a small team, you will be able to have a massive impact. Not just on Simple Poll the product and its millions of users but also on the company, our culture, and our day to day collaboration.

From an engineering perspective Simple Poll can often feel similar to building an API. Slack apps work largely by receiving JSON payloads from Slack, making API calls to the Slack API, and then returning some JSON back to Slack. As such, our engineering work tends to be very backend-heavy and although we do have a web dashboard, writing HTML, CSS, and JavaScript is more rare.

In our day to day work we face an interesting set of evolving engineering and product challenges:

• One such challenge is dealing creatively with the constraints of the Slack platform. Since Simple Poll exists almost entirely within Slack, we are bound by many of the constraints and extension capabilities of the Slack platform, such as the block kit framework (https://api.slack.com/block-kit). A powerful set of tools is available to us, but the path to bringing a feature to life is sometimes not as straightforward as it seems.
• We also constantly face trade offs between making Simple Poll more powerful (and implementing a long list of customer feature requests) while simultaneously maintaining and improving the simplicity that out customers love. Finding a good balance is important here and often we find that there is a way to achieve both capability and simplicity.
• Slack is also constantly evolving and it is our responsibility to keep up with this evolution to ensure that Simple Poll works no matter what Slack context users find themselves in. Recent wide-reaching changes have been the introduction of Slack Enterprise Grid (multiple Slack workspace under the same umbrella) and Slack Connect (shared channels between different Slack workspaces). These changes make it more challenging to model Slack entities like users and channels – if you’re curious to learn more about this problem, check out this blog post: https://wilhelmklopp.com/posts/slack-database-modelling/

Remote

We are remote-first with folks across Canada, the UK, and Germany 🌅  We love and embrace remote working (and have done so even in pre-pandemic times). But especially as the pandemic winds down and more travel opens up, we plan to regularly get everyone together for a one-week company offsite, probably twice a year. Our last company offsite took us to Toronto in Canada 🍁

The ideal candidate

• Excellent verbal and written communication skills
• A high degree of empathy
• 3+ years of experience working on production web applications written primarily in Python
• Experience with JavaScript, HTML, and CSS
• You care about the product as well as the code
• You enjoy picking up new skills and are always learning and growing
• You have an ability to think critically and pragmatically about designing systems and building features
• You enjoy shipping and getting things done

Responsibilities

• Write, review, deploy, and maintain code in mostly Python (back end) and HTML/CSS/JavaScript (front end)
• Collaborate with the rest of the team on defining and implementing new features and coordinate to prioritise engineering work
• Debug production issues and implement corresponding fixes
• Take ownership of parts of the codebase
• Document the systems you help build, monitor, and maintain
• Evaluate and recommend solutions to guide team decision making
• Improve engineering standards, tooling, and processes
• Rotating responsibilities for on-call

You Might Work On

• Architecting and implementing new features. Some of the things coming up on our roadmap are blind polls, ranked polls, exports to google sheets, and many more!
• UX Improvements to make Simple Poll simpler and more flexible
• Performance improvements to make Simple Poll faster
• Improving reliability, which could for example entail setting up a new Datadog dashboard
• Work with a designer to build a new page in our frontend and then implement that page based on their design
• Something completely different! As an early stage company, we tend to be pretty "all hands on deck" when something comes up that we need to get done
• Use and provide feedback on Kolo. A local Django development tool that we’ve been building

Practicals and benefits

• You will report directly to the CEO (Wilhelm)
• This is a fully remote, full time (40 hours per week) position. Your primary timezone must be between UTC-5 and UTC+2 (inclusive on both ends) to ensure we have enough overlap as a team
• We'll buy you a new MacBook Pro and any other tools you need to do your best work (screens, accessories, etc.)
• 30 days of holiday a year (including local national holidays), and you're encouraged to take all of it. You're also free to take additional time off for any other reasonable reasons, for example if you're sick (of course!) but also if you need to spend an afternoon taking care of something personal.
• Sustainable and healthy working matters to us. We care about building delightful products for our customers, not hitting arbitrary daily hour counts.
• The start date for this role is January or February 2022

Our principles

Inspired (often straight up copied) by the Zen of GitHub and the Zen of Python

Explicit is better than implicit

Simple is better than complex

Favor focus over features

Anything added dilutes everything else

Mind your words, they are important

Craft the details, they matter

Ship early and often

Never miss an opportunity to delight

Build for the long term

Use what you build with pride

Create lasting value for customers

Mistakes are possible when moving fast

Empower with courtesy and empathy

Our tech stack

• Python + Django
• PostgresQL
• Heroku
• Amazon Web Services
• GitHub
• HTML, Tailwind CSS, Vanilla JavaScript
• Slack, Datadog, Zoom, Gmail, Google Calendar, Notion
• Our own products! (including https://kolo.app)

How to apply

Apply via this form

Have any questions? Email me: wilhelm@simplepoll.rocks

We're excited to review your application!