Senior Backend Engineer

We are looking for a Senior Backend Engineer for the Marketing Tech team!

About Babbel:

At Babbel, we believe that everyone should have the chance to learn a new language. Our products are available worldwide across multiple platforms and support those who take joy in learning outside of work or school. Millions of users are benefiting from 9,000+ hours of language content created by Babbel's team of in-house language experts. Our professionally-designed courses are available for 14 languages via the Babbel website as well as on mobile devices, podcasts, and in live virtual classes through our new Babbel Live product.

Babbel has just been named a 2023 “Most Innovative Company” by Fast Company and has been recognized on the GSV EdTech 150 list for multiple years. Since its founding in 2007, the company has grown to become the market leader in app-based and virtual-class language learning. More than 750 team members from 70 countries share in Babbel's purpose of creating mutual understanding through language.

Babbel is headquartered in Berlin and has an office in New York City, where this position is based.

About the Role:

Your mission is to support the Engineering Manager, himself leading the team/people/processes, by working as Senior Engineer leading the way technically to evolve our ecosystem of apps & services to help our marketing stakeholders drive company revenue. We are looking for a strong senior engineer to own the infrastructure and systems behind attribution models, own end-to-end data flows, and be involved in a key team for our organization. You will have the opportunity to join as a key player within a recently created cross-functional team to work together with the Engineering Manager, Product Manager, and other various team members while having the autonomy and accountability to drive the organization forward, acting as a technical leader and mentor within the team.

You will:

• Deliver value iteratively by building high-quality applications and features
• Build, maintain, and take ownership of an ecosystem of applications and services, such as an internal Rails app, an internal JS library & various microservices (AWS Lambdas, etc.) using an event-driven architecture
• Own architectural design and constantly propose improvements to the existing features
• Ensure that the systems you own are healthy, resilient, and perform well, including anticipating scaling needs, writing corresponding configuration changes in Terraform, and collaborating with our Infrastructure team for validation and deployment
• Collaborate cross-functionally on feature design, architectural decisions, and assessing technical debt
• Shape our coding guidelines and quality standards
• Respond to, troubleshoot, and solve operational events (bugs and incidents)
• Focus on continuous learning and improvement and drive the evolution of our engineering practices
• Mentor the future engineers joining the team
• Own the overall architecture (for the part being within our team scope), identifying/managing dependencies and syncing with potential other stakeholders using the same resources
• Be consulted regularly (as well as other team members) in building the team’s agile processes best adapted to the team and responsibilities while growing progressively the team scope, and iterate along the way to adapt to business needs and feedback from within and outside the team
• Support the Engineering Manager in defining technical requirements for user stories and projects of the team (as most of the stories involve being really aware of the whole architecture and dependencies when doing even small changes), doing the corresponding estimation

You are:

• A can-do person, ready to build MVPs and iterate on them in short cycles
• Able to find the right balance between time-to-delivery and quality
• Able and keen to work following lean and agile practices
• An enthusiast for and/or experienced in collaborating with product and business stakeholders, building a trusting working environment together
• Effective in time management and have good communication and interpersonal skills

You have:

• 5+ years nodejs experience building scalable systems and applications, with some hosted on AWS
• Experience and confidence in leading technical projects involving serverless and event-driven architectures, and using AWS Lambda and other AWS resources
• Experience and/or confidence in leading technical Ruby on Rails projects
• Strong sense for good API design
• Experience with NoSQL databases (DynamoDB, MongoDB)
• Knowledge of analyzing metrics about system health and performance
• Experience with Continuous Integration and “tooling & monitoring” tools such as DataDog, CloudWatch, PagerDuty, Rollbar, or similar
• Knowledge in testing on different levels: unit, integration, contract, and E2E
• Good understanding of HTTP

Nice to have:

• Proficiency, previous experience, or interest in Marketing or even AdTech/MarTech
• Experience and/or interest in projects involving Data collection and reporting
• Startup experience (Product mindset)
• Proficient knowledge in JavaScript, HTML, CSS (incl. preprocessors and CSS in JS)
• Knowledge in component-based frontend frameworks, ideally React and Redux
• Experience with infrastructure-as-code and infrastructure automation, ideally with Terraform

Benefits: 

• Working at an international start-up with a strong sense of mission
• Bonus eligible and generous 401K matching
• Responsibility from day one; you can make an impact!
• Strong skill and career development
• 20 PTO days every year with additional tenure-based days after 2 years
• Flexible and hybrid work environment, with 2 days/week required in office  

Salary Range: $150,000/yr - $180,000/yr, bonus eligible and generous 401K matching

Babbel is an equal opportunity employer committed to diversity and inclusion.