Principal Software Engineer
ASIA-PACIFIC ENGINEERING FULL-TIME
The Opportunity
Shorthand is a growing company that provides a digital publishing platform to many of the world’s best known publishers, brands, not-for-profits, and universities. With customers on every continent (except Antarctica!), there’s never been a more exciting time to join Shorthand. Our company has the rare distinction in this era of money-burning startups of being both investor-backed and comfortably profitable. We're a small team of geeks with art and heart, and a high bar for quality.
To deliver our magic to customers and their audiences, we build software that is scalable, flexible, reliable and as simple as possible but no simpler.
The Role
We tend to do things a little differently at Shorthand. For one thing, we’re a small team distributed around the world. For this role we’ll happily take applications from anywhere in the Asia-Pacific region, but applicants must be fluent in English.
This role will share responsibility for designing, engineering and scaling our backend systems and services.
We are looking for someone who:
- Is whip smart, as demonstrated by career achievements and/or school/university results
- Has good knowledge of cloud-based web architectures.
- Experienced in system design and distributed computing.
- Has a wide range of experience and expertise across languages, frameworks and approaches such as Javascript, Typescript, and ReactJS, NodeJS, scripting, serverless, and microservices.
- Is an expert in using git.
- Has worked with CI/CD processes before (CircleCI/Jenkins preferably).
- Has an extremely high bar for quality.
- Is thorough and detail-oriented.
- Can learn fast.
- Has great communication skills, particularly with respect to writing.
- Gains deep satisfaction from helping to make products better.
- Has experience of working in a small business or startup environment.
- Preferably has experience collaborating with diverse, geographically-dispersed teams.
Core Responsibilities:
- Own backend development and contribute to other areas of the product.
- Learn, evolve and improve an existing application/system architecture.
- Review code from other engineers and provide feedback.
- Help secure the environment.
- Develop Shorthand app server-side and API functionality to help improve the customer experience.
- Contribute to the technical direction of the Shorthand tool.
- Report bugs.
- Communicate with the customer support team and customers to suggest solutions to issues.
- Assist in the creation of product documentation when required.
Qualifications:
- A minimum 10 years of experience in Software Engineering roles.
- A minimum 3 years of experience in web application development.
- Thorough knowledge of NodeJS and the web.
- Experience with AWS.
- A university qualification in computer science or a closely related field, or equivalent career experience required.
Personality Attributes:
- You are a proactive self-starter, who does not need to be told what to do and will be resourceful in order to find solutions to any challenge.
- You thrive in a fast-paced and demanding environment, and possess a high level of intellectual curiosity.
- You are collaborative.
- You find fulfillment in the job itself, and happiness in a job well done.