Join the Credo family

Principal Backend Engineer (Permissions)

Productboard

Productboard

Software Engineering
London, UK
Posted on Oct 5, 2023

When we started in 2014, our focus was on product managers in smaller teams who lacked a great product management tool. Today, we are the leading product management platform. We now help much larger companies with thousands of employees, and we deal with quite different needs and personas.

We're facing a huge architectural shift in terms of how we scale our product. To meet the growing demands of the enterprise market, we’re getting ready to redesign our systems. The aim is to make it more scalable and improve the overall experience for our customers — from performance and flexibility to permissions.

About the Permissions team

Setting up appropriate access levels allows product teams to easily share, and safely collaborate, inside the Productboard ecosystem, while also maintaining control over their most important or sensitive data.

The Permissions team works across two constructs, shaping how users can access the capabilities and content of our platform. We design the AuthN and AuthZ systems, which are provided as a service to customers as well as the other product teams at Productboard, giving our team both a strong product component and platform aspect.

Scope of work

Your homebase will be the Permissions team, but you will be the technical lead for the Foundation Pillar and act at the EPD level. 

  • Coordinate the tech leads of our six pillar teams (Permissions, Multiplayer, Ecosystem, Internal Applications, Design System, and Satismeter)  and collaborate with their engineering managers to effectively push tech initiatives
  • Dedicate ~30% of your time to Permissions-specific work
  • Contribute to the Foundations Pillar leadership group representing technology
  • As an active leader in the Architecture Guild, lead Engineering-wide technical initiatives

On a Typical Day, You Will…

… Have time to focus: Dedicate a good couple of hours to deliver on both strategic and tactical fronts:

  • Shape the medium-long-term Permissions technical strategy, including the definition of engineering metrics, data models, system design, migration approaches and steps, as well as the interface of our internal AaaS (Authorization of a Service), with a focus on great developer experience
  • Define Pillar or Org-level target architectures and a plan to deliver them. Work in the entire scope of the Foundations Pillar being the de facto technical architect
  • Publish and review technical documents 
  • Crack the most challenging technical problems and deliver on the Permissions roadmap according to our weekly plans

… Set goals and collaborate with other Engineers or teams to achieve them

  • Be the AuthN/AuthZ expert and technical leader of the domain: lead cross-team system design discussions and be accountable for the outcomes
  • Be the last line of defense when it comes to permissions-related questions or debugging of customer issues, while spreading your knowledge within the team. Become a thought leader in the industry and help shape the standards
  • Take full ownership of the Foundations Pillar’s technical direction and roadmap and lead the pillar (and the Permissions team specifically) in fulfilling these goals
  • Be an active leader in the Architecture Guild and shape how systems are designed at Productboard and set an example of what good engineering practices should look like  
  • Support engineers with coaching, mentoring, peer reviews (on concepts or code), and overcoming dependencies 
  • Raise the bar and make sure that the group around you is aiming toward technical excellence. Actively support ICs to level themselves up and grow in their career
  • Make yourself available for collaborative sessions within the team or other engineers in the pillar (discovery, pair solution design, pair programming, pair review, etc.) and make sure the collaboration is effective and results in decisions or clear action items

About You

  • Have a proven DevX mentality 
  • You have 10+ years of experience in services, product development, or infrastructure. The ideal candidate has significant software-as-a-product, web-scale delivery, database, distributed architecture, and software engineering experience.
  • A strong mentor to junior staff, with the ability to lead and teach others to ensure technical alignment.
  • You have a deep understanding of the fundamentals required to build highly available and scalable services.
  • You understand – and can articulate and lead conversations on – the benefits and associated trade-offs between asynchronous and synchronous processing, various methods for sharding and segmenting services, and how to foresee, plan for, and prevent scaling bottlenecks.
  • You have 5-10 years of design experience with medium to large-scale containerized / Linux operating system production environments, preferably as part of an online service (SaaS) provider environment.
  • You have solid financial acumen – you should understand the cost trade-offs of various technology decisions.
  • You can demonstrate a solid understanding of cloud technologies and strategies to scale SaaS products, with a focus on reducing operational costs and time to market.
  • You can articulate the value of virtualization technologies, big data systems, cloud platforms, and enabling services.
  • You have demonstrable competency in modern languages and frameworks – e.g. experience with React.js using Typescript, Ruby, Java, Kotlin, Kafka, PostgreSQL, Elastic – Cache / Search, Redis, AWS, or Kubernetes is a plus.
  • Experience using iterative development fundamentals, including experience with SCRUM, Agile or other iterative approaches.
  • Demonstrable experience building, evolving, maintaining, and operating high-volume SaaS products.
  • AuthN/AuthZ expertise is a plus

You can look forward to the following benefits:

💰 Stock options

💻 MacBook

📚 Budget for online courses, books, and conferences

🏝 5 weeks of vacation + sick days

❤️ 1 Volunteer Day per year for you to help causes close to your heart

🍹 Team events, such as off-sites and retreats

💚 Shared Headspace account for mindfulness & mental health

🧒🏻 Parental benefits

🎓 Language lessons

🍀 Mental Wellness Program to support your well-being and self-care

🏥 Comprehensive Health Insurance

👨🏼‍🦳 Pension Contribution

🤒 Illness Protection

💟 Death in Service Benefit

 

About Productboard

Productboard is a customer-centric product management platform that helps organizations get the right products to market, faster. More than 5,400 companies, including Microsoft, Zoom, 1-800-Contacts, and UiPath, use Productboard to understand what users need, prioritize what to build next, and rally everyone around their roadmap.

With offices in San Francisco, Vancouver, Dublin, Brno and Prague, Productboard is backed by leading investors like Tiger Global Management, Dragoneer Investment Group, Index Ventures, Kleiner Perkins, Sequoia Capital, Bessemer Venture Partners, and Credo Ventures. 

In January 2022, we closed our $125M Series D round, which put us into the Unicorn category of companies, with a valuation of $1.7B.

  • Join at the golden startup age — established stability of a Unicorn with space for individual impact
  • You’ll enjoy an exciting team atmosphere, building a whole new category of software
  • You can help change the way that products are built all over the world
  • We iterate quickly and decisions are fast. You’ll have a voice in what we do and see the impact of your work
  • We are backed by top Silicon Valley investors, giving us access to capital, networks, mentors, and new markets
  • We are recognized as one of the hottest tech startups on the market today, named by Forbes magazine and Business Insider as one of the best startup employers to bet your career on and are regularly recognized for our company culture

About our culture

Imagine working in a place where everything matters — most importantly, you. At Productboard, values aren’t just something we like to talk about, they’re something we live and breathe. We believe in creating a work environment where:

  • People feel empowered, supported, and included
  • Trust and transparency are built into the way we work
  • Creativity, curiosity, and continuous improvement are encouraged and nurtured every day

Forming our company values was a group effort, with every employee allowed to contribute. From profit-sharing initiatives, like stock options, to open calendars and communication, we don’t waste time on politics or ego. We champion openness by sharing our goals, success, and failures. 

Join colleagues who love what they do and who are invested in their work environment and the future of the company. Help shape our company, culture, and product!

Check out our LinkedIn Life page, Instagram profile, and People of Productboard FB page or listen to our People of Productboard podcast for a real feel of what life is like at Productboard.

Equal Opportunity Employer Statement

We are an equal opportunity employer and champion equity. It is our aim to help people from all backgrounds, cultures, and groups realize their full potential at Productboard. We do not tolerate any discrimination or harassment based upon gender identity, race, color, religion, age, sexual orientation, non-disqualifying physical or mental disability, national origin, veteran status, or any other biascovered by appropriate law. All aspects of employment, including hiring, training, promotion, and terminations, are based on merit, competence, performance, and business needs. We are committed to an inclusive hiring process and provide all candidates with equal opportunity to demonstrate their abilities. Togetherness is one of our core values, and our Diversity Council helps to ensure that we uphold the values of authenticity, humanity, and diversity to create an environment where every person matters. We are committed to leading by example to drive societal change.