Staff Engineer

About Akeneo
Akeneo is the product experience (PX) company, enabling organisations to build and deliver world-class product experiences across every customer touchpoint through a comprehensive PX Strategy. Akeneo's intelligent Product Cloud equips global brands, manufacturers, distributors, and retailers to accelerate growth, reduce time-to-market, and deliver engaging customer experiences that convert browsers into buyers.
At Akeneo, our teammates are the driving force behind who we are and where we want to go as a company. We work every day to shape a first-class work environment and culture, which is rooted in our core values of Humble Hunger, Diligent Benevolence, Responsible Pioneers and Inclusive Community! Our Purple Fire isn't just a set of values; it's our unique way of igniting passion and driving excellence. Bold and fun, with a hint of the unexpected - it is the essence of who we are.
We want our people to help us grow and to grow with us, and that's why we do whatever it takes to equip our employees with everything they may need to make a tangible impact on themselves, the business and the company. Let our intrepid three-headed mascot #ZiggyTheHydra welcome you into her world and join us at Akeneo! Learn more about who we are as an employer and about our Culture and Values via our Career page.
Job Description
We are seeking a talented Staff Engineer with a strong bias towards action to join us. Our organisation is structured similarly to AWS, with each Product Line operating independently under a Single Threaded Owner (STO) at VP level. Within each Product Line, multiple Area Single Threaded Owners (Area-STOs) at Director level oversee several Impact Teams. Each Impact Team, led by an Impact Owner, comprises approximately eight engineers, designers and PMs who work autonomously, following their own processes and methodologies.
This Staff Engineer role will contribute to one or two of our various Impact Teams, which focus on different areas of our product. The specific team(s) will be determined based on your performance and interests during the general interview process (see below). Reporting directly to an Area-STO, you will collaborate closely with teams of engineers, product managers, designers and external stakeholders.
Responsibilities

• Technical Leadership: Drive technical excellence within a Product Area and the wider engineering team by setting and maintaining best practices and standards. (e.g., leading the engineering guild and running practice drills with the team)
• Architecture Design: Develop and improve scalable, high-performance, and cost-effective solutions for complex problems. (e.g., re-architecting legacy systems to improve efficiency, scale and easy of contribution)
• Problem Solving: Collaborate with cross-functional teams and across product lines to identify and solve challenging technical problems. (e.g., highly-complex data distribution to 3rd party systems that cost-effectively scales)
• Unified Team: Foster a unified team environment by promoting deep customer-centricity, technical collaboration and open communication. (e.g., working with teams to workshop options and think creatively about solving problems)
• Mentorship: Provide mentorship and guidance to engineers, fostering a culture of continuous learning and improvement. (e.g., deep-dive retrospectives on projects)
• Innovation: Stay abreast of industry trends and emerging technologies to continuously improve our technology stack. (e.g., evaluating and prototyping build/buy/partner options)
• Potential for Team Management: As opportunities arise, take on team management responsibilities, such as stepping into an Impact Owner role.

Qualifications

• Extensive Experience: You have 8+ years of experience in hands-on software development, with a strong background in building SaaS solutions that scale. Preferably PHP, Go, Python, Typescript and React.
• Proven Track Record: You have a history of delivering impact end-to-end as well as taking ownership to turn around projects.
• Technical Expertise: You possess in-depth knowledge of software architecture principles and have successfully designed and implemented complex systems that scale and have experience decoupling large codebases.
• Leadership Skills: You have demonstrated leadership in previous roles, guiding teams through technical challenges over time and delivering impact directly as well as indirectly.
• Communication Skills: You can effectively communicate complex technical concepts to non-technical stakeholders, ensuring alignment and understanding.
• Adaptability: You thrive in a fast-paced, impact focused environment and can handle uncertainties and changing requirements with ease.
• Team Leadership Experience: Previous experience leading an engineering team, particularly in environments where technical leadership and direct impact go hand in hand. (e.g. driving team execution, or acting as a technical lead with management responsibilities).

Life at Akeneo: Benefits

• Culture
  • Diverse, cross-cultural team.
  • Annual All Staff gathering week, office parties, team offsites
  • Top-notch 8-week onboarding program for new teammates, including live presentations, online courses you can take at your own pace, and an exhaustive checklist with all the resources, calls-to-action and support contacts for a smooth integration into the company
• Time off
  • Flexible working hours, hybrid home office policy
• Health & Wellness
  • Individual and confidential coaching sessions with a mental health practitioner of your choice
• Equipment
  • Best-in-class communication and collaboration tools: Slack, Notion, Google Suite, Jira, GitHub...
  • Choose between MacOS or Linux
  • Personal remote allowance to maximise your home office environment
• Professional Development
  • Participation in in-house events welcoming external guests (ie. Meetups) or industry events
  • Group and individual training opportunities
• Corporate Responsibility
  • Employee Volunteering programme: give back to the community with two days per year dedicated to supporting the charities of your choice.
  • Diversity & Inclusion: Akeneo provides and ensures a safe work environment for everyone, regardless of seniority, gender identity, and expression, sexual orientation, disability, mental illness, neuro(a)typicality, personal appearance, body size, race, ethnicity, age, religion, nationality, or other characteristics. Akeneo is deeply anti-racist, anti-homophobic, anti-sexist, anti-ableist, and inclusive. We create the right conditions for you to feel safe and be yourself!

Interview Process
All interviews will be conducted remotely and ideally within two weeks, depending on your availability. We are asking for a total of around six hours of your time. There are no take home exercises, coding tests or surprises. We will not continue the process if you do not pass a step, this is to save you time and effort. If we decided not to move forward we will provide you with feedback.

• Screening
  • Phone Screen: If your application has caught our attention, you will receive an invitation to a short conversation with one of our Talent Acquisition Specialists, where you'll learn more about the role and about Akeneo. You will be asked to send through "Code You Can Speak To" which will be used to validate that you are able to start the interview loop and during the technical interview to aid discussion and deep dive into decision making.
  • Hiring Manager Chat: This short interview will allow you to go in more depth into what the role entails and discuss your experience and skills.
• General Interview Loop: These interviews ensure you are qualified to join Akeneo and that you have what the Product Line needs at this point in time. Before each interview you will receive an email detailing the types of questions you will be asked and who your interviewers will be so you can research and prepare.
  • Technical Deep Dive: You will be asked to bring "Code You Can Speak To" to discuss and go deep within the 2 hour interview with a Staff Engineer and the CTO. You will also discuss how you would solve an Akeneo specific complex problem with limited knowledge and understanding. The Staff Engineer is looking to see how you think critically, expose gaps, navigate ambiguity, focus on impact and execute.
  • Behavioural Deep Dive: You will spend 2 hours with a cross-functional panel of peers. They are looking to see what it's like to work with you and how you add to our values. This interview relies heavily on examples from your past, so take some time to think back and write down some so you are best prepared. We want to emphasise that the purpose of this interview is not to "test" you. Instead, our goal is to create an environment and opportunities for you to express yourself fully, allowing us to understand your years of experience in a short timeframe. We encourage you to think of the interviewers as collaborators, there to ensure you have every opportunity to shine. We're genuinely interested in learning about your experiences, thought processes, and approaches to problem-solving.
• Team Interviews: The general interview loop will assess your technical skills, personality and how you can add to our culture. During this process we will gain an understanding of where you fit best within the organisation and will select the team.
  • Area-STO & Impact Owner: You will spend an hour with the leaders of the team we feel you are best suited to. They will discuss what they are working on, some of the challenges they are facing and will be keen to see how you might be able to help.
  • Team Meet: Your entire team will want to meet you at this point for an hour to see if you are someone that they would like to work with and learn from. The team will be curious about you as a person and what you want for your next chapter.
• Offer

At all stages of your recruitment process, our Talent Acquisition team is committed to giving you an update in a one-week time frame.
So? Is this job description all about you? Then what are you waiting for - click that Apply button so that we can meet you without further delay!
Feeling hesitant because you think you're not checking 100% of the requirements for the job, but still feel confident and motivated to grow into the position? Don't hesitate to apply anyway, or reach out to us for questions or clarifications!