The Jack of all trades of the Freemius’ development team
Freemius is a SaaS startup that helps plugin & theme developers around the globe run their business and accept payments, manage subscriptions & software licensing, get user-data, offer trials and (much) more.
Hi, my name is Vova Feldman, and I’m the founder of Freemius. I started the company with the vision of enabling coders around the globe to make their livelihood from building, sustaining, and growing subscription-first software product businesses of their passion.
As a technical founder with more than 23 years of experience in software design, architecture, and development, I was and still responsible for leading the tech 6 years after (couldn’t have been possible without the help of my awesome team, of course!).
Even though our engineering team is still small (4 kick-ass developers 💪), with our rapid product development and fast execution, tasks get piled up in the review queue faster than I can process. I realize I become the product development bottleneck simply because I can’t allocate enough time for engineering.
It’s time for me to pass the VP Engineering torch 🔥 to someone I can trust to lead our product engineering to excellence so I can focus on scaling the team and company.
If you see yourself working just as a means to get a salary, we totally respect that, but it’s not the type of mentality we seek. On the other hand, if your spouse/friends keep telling you that you have to stop caring so much about your work and your answer is “this project is my baby” that’s the exact sense of ownership we are looking for.
Your role’s main objectives:
Code Ownership
You’ll conduct ongoing code reviews, test feature branches, refactor, optimize code for performance, merge branches, and deploy to production.
Project & Product Management
You’ll be managing our product development kanban board on Asana and our public feature-requests board. While prioritizing tasks based on our roadmap and customer needs and ensuring product development is on track (both on time & quality).
SysAdmin & DevOps
In the “background,” you’ll need to wear a SysAdmin hat to ensure our cloud-based infrastructure runs smoothly and scales. That involves things like:
You’ll also deal with some DevOps to help the engineering team (& yourself) work more efficiently. E.g., automating testing & deployments using CI/CD.
Training & Mentoring
You’ll be conducting thorough code reviews, not only to make sure the code is great but also because you want to educate your fellow developers about the “art of code” and the best “painting” techniques.
You’ll also need to keep your hand on the pulse for modern development trends, tools, and technologies, to see what can be integrated into the team to improve efficiency, performance, etc.
Databases
As the platform grows in features, functionality, and amounts of data we store & process, you’ll be responsible for maintaining our database, adding new indexes, designing new tables, setting up replicas, data migrations, etc.
Cloud
We manage our servers on AWS mostly utilizing EC2 for computing, Elastic Load Balancing, and S3 for storage.
Web Stack
We use LEMP stack, so experience configuring Linux, Nginx, PHP, and MySQL is required.
Frontend
Our projects are built in multiple frontend frameworks, including ReactJS, Angular, AngularJS, and Vue.js.
Backend / API
All the projects are API-driven, so they use the same API built on an in-house Laravel-like framework with robust & performant components and abstraction layers such as DAL, ORM, REST, Rule Engine, Queues, Email Scheduling, and more.
Version Control
All our code is version controlled using Git. We use GitHub and BitBucket to host our repos and follow GitFlow as our branching model.
IDE
We use JetBrains’ PhpStorm as our primary IDE with Xdebug configured. We also use Visual Studio Code, mostly for React and Angular development.
Documentation
We manage our project’s coding conventions on a private Wiki and maintain our technical documentation on a shared Google Drive.
You are an outstanding full stack developer who led a small engineering team in an early-stage startup/company. You are a disciplined person who understands the merits of dedication and hard work.
You are a creative problem solver who enjoys a good challenge. Whether it’s digging into the code to identify a root cause of a bug, figuring out how to configure & optimize a reverse proxy with Nginx, or designing and planning a new project from scratch.
You have an “everything is possible” attitude. You’re not afraid to take on any challenge as you know it’s all about time, resources, and priorities.
You love coding and are fluent in scalable software architecture & API driven web apps.
You appreciate the art of clear, beautifully written, and well-documented code. You develop and test your code with a debugger, know how to balance speed and storage consumption, and only commit thoroughly-tested code.
Your colleagues call you a “human debugger” as you can spot a missing semicolon from miles. You are a freak of code conventions & indentation and know the importance of semantic code.
You know that attention to detail is what separates the good from the great.
You strive to write scalable, performant, secure, and durable code. But you also know how to respect legacy code, no matter how ugly it looks, and have a finesse that allows you to be flexible and balance code perfection with the business needs and priorities.
You are a product-oriented engineer. You have a good eye for UI and a solid understanding of UX. You understand that code is a means to an end and not the final product. You care about solving user problems more than using the latest technologies.
You know how to take a complex problem, figure out how to solve it technologically and turn it into an actionable & executable plan.
You enjoy sharing your knowledge by educating & mentoring others through training sessions, advising calls, and code reviews. While you enjoy working and collaborating with people, you do your best work in isolation without interruption.
You’re great at written communication through instant messaging and emails. You can convey your message in a clear and concise form, an essential skill for a distributed team.
You embrace failures and learn from them. You push yourself to grow & get better professionally. You’re open to constructive feedback and humble enough to receive it from any team member.
You want to take part in a journey of an agile & fast-growing startup.
Excellent verbal and written English
Easy to communicate with – you’re good at expressing your thoughts in writing
Organized and methodological
Comfortable working remotely during European timezone hours (9-6 GMT+2)
A quick learner
Hard worker and passionate – we are a startup
Computer Science degree (or equivalent)
A comprehensive understanding of what it takes to write secure and performant code
Excellent understanding of OOP
Good eye for UI and a solid grasp of UX
5 years of PHP app development experience
5 years of SQL experience: designing efficient tables, understanding DB performance & indexing, speed vs. storage
5 years of HTML & CSS development experience
3 years of JavaScript development experience
2 years of Sass experience
2 years of experience with automation tools (Gulp, Grunt, Parcel, Webpack, etc.)
2 years of AWS experience (EC2, Load Balancing, S3)
Experience integrating & working with 3rd-party APIs
2 years of Chrome Dev Tools experience
Experience in building REST or GraphQL APIs
Experience in developing WordPress plugins
Experience with modern SPA technologies (ReactJS, AngularJS, Angular2+, Vue.js, etc.)
You already use Freemius in one of your plugins/themes
Work from anywhere, as long as you have your computer, a strong internet connection and can be productive
Work in a flat organization where your voice is always heard
Opportunities for paid travel toattend WordCamps and other industry conferences
Job horizon – we are looking for a long term engagement and would love to see you grow with and within the company
Freemius is committed to creating a diverse environment and is proud to be an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, gender, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, national origin, genetics, disability, age, or veteran status.
