Staff Engineer (Platform squad)

Staff Engineer to Alva Labs
You spend half of your waking life working. Finding the right job really matters. Unfortunately, around 40% of all hires are seen as unsuccessful. It can be due to the employee leaving earlier than expected, problems in performance, lack of opportunities for growth, and many other reasons. But it doesn’t have to be like this.

Alva Labs is now looking for our very first Staff Engineer for our newly started Platform squad. This is a key role in order to raise the bar for how the engineering team works. You will play an instrumental part in improving the developer experience at Alva as well as leading cross-squad initiatives. And most importantly: have an impact on the way companies hire.

Excited yet? Continue to read!

The company
If one should summarise what we as a company are doing, it could be something like this:

Alva Labs is a Stockholm-based SaaS company that offers a solution to help global companies grow their team in a scientific way. Combining state-of-the-art psychometrics, data science, and an obsession with candidate experience, we provide the needed tool for data-driven talent acquisition. Alva also serves candidates by allowing them to discover what job opportunities are the best matches, given each candidate’s unique background, personality and ability. In fancy words: Alva is becoming a SaaS-enabled talent marketplace, matching companies and candidates.

We have been growing 2-3x per year (in terms of people, revenue, users, and customers) and are in the exciting phase to launch our product in new markets. The core of everything we do is our product. We have come a long way and have happy users - both candidates and customers - but we are only getting started. It is now time to take the next big steps in becoming what we want to become; the product that can be the game-changer in company building around the world.

The role
You will be the first Staff Engineer on Alva’s engineering team, meaning you will have room to define the role and set an example for others. Your time will be split between writing code in the context of your squad and leading cross-squad engineering initiatives. This role will enable you to have a big impact on how Alva works with technology, both within the engineering department as well as the company as a whole. On a day-to-day basis, you will;

- Have fun!

- Write code!

- Facilitate and lead a cross-squad architecture forum with senior representatives from each squad.

- Together with the cross-squad architecture forum, own Alva’s tech roadmap.

- Prioritize what technical improvements the engineering team should be focusing on right now.

- Set the direction for where Alva Engineering is heading from a technical point of view, both in the medium-long and long term.

The team
The engineering department has (like the rest of the company) developed extensively over the last 12 months. Today we are a team of around 15 developers and are now about to introduce a Platform squad to continuously work on the developer experience. This is something we believe must be a top priority as both our system and our team expand. We are already successfully working in cross-functional product squads, so this is a natural next step for us in our growth journey.

The platform squad’s mission is to empower the product squads to do their day-to-day work more efficiently on their own. Together with 2-3 other developers, you will support them with the tools and services needed to enable them to ship and work with our code base efficiently.

Within the platform squad, you will work with initiatives such as (but not limited to);

- Building tooling that improves the local development environment for all engineers at Alva.

- Improve the observability of our system by both introducing new tools and improving the usage of our existing tools.

- Take the way that we build and deploy our services to the next level.

- Own, operate and improve our GraphQL schema federation gateway.

- Working on important security initiatives together with our Head of Information Security.

You
To be a fit for this role, we believe you are well-versed in the backend landscape. Preferably you love Python and Google cloud as much as we do, but to be honest - we care more about if you are a skilled developer with the right mindset than knowing every inch of our tech stack. Given that this is a senior position, we expect you to have solid knowledge about cloud architecture and best practices related to how to write secure code.

You will also be a qualified candidate if you:

- Are an expert in Backend programming, DevOps, and Site Reliability Engineering

- Have solid experience in technical project management

- Love solving complex problems and turning them into solutions that breathe simplicity

- Are ambitious and structured

- Are a prestigeless team player

- Are an efficient communicator with great skills in English. There is no need to speak Swedish.

What we offer
We strongly believe that experimentation is the best way of learning and making decisions about product and technology. Therefore, we try our best to keep the feedback loops short to iteratively improve our product and our system. For this to be possible, we need a modern system that is pleasant to work with. The core of our tech stack is;

- Python

- Google Cloud Platform

- Pub/Sub

- PostgreSQL, Firestore

- Kubernetes, Cloud Run

- Protocol buffers

- Typescript

- Event-driven microservices

Interested in more details? Continue to read → (https://alvalabs.notion.site/Working-as-a-Software-Engineer-at-Alva-ebfa7e5d7ffe41f9bffd86650c48cb3e) ←.

Other things to look forward to if you join our team are;

- A team of knowledgeable Engineers and Engineering managers to learn from and grow with.

- 7 weeks of vacation!

- On-market salary and stock options.

- Flexible work hours and a hybrid model (you decide if you are at the office or remote within Europe).

- A well-used and appreciated system to work on.

- A company that actually puts the product first.

- 80+ coworkers from 18+ nationalities.

- A value- & purpose-driven organization that has the opportunity to change the world of hiring, and impact lives (read about our company values → here (https://www.notion.so/alvalabs/Alva-Values-630a69c6c72642f2b1caab5dab55b953) ←).

The hiring process
Given that we claim to be experts in hiring, you probably wonder what we have in store for you.

- Objective sc...