Job Description

Principal Full Stack Engineer

Playful Software is on a mission to make it fun for non-technical users to create their own sites and apps. Whether it’s an interactive meme to post to social media, a private app to connect directly with family or friends, or a community-developed app to bring people together, we want to help you have fun making it and finding your audience. At Playful Software, we see a great opportunity to build a new class of creative tools that will enable a vibrant creative community to create rich expressions that include video, animation, and interactivity.

As a Principal Full Stack Engineer at Playful Software, you will play a pivotal role in building out the initial platform and MVP release of our product. You’ll have the opportunity to work directly with startup veterans to build a product from the ground up in a fun, productive environment.

What to expect:

·        Work the first version of the product platform with founders and team

·        Contribute across the full stack where necessary

·        Lead on front-end systems and architecture.

·        Build efficient, scalable, and reusable front-end systems and abstractions

·        Find and address performance issues

·        Participate in regular design and code reviews

·        Identify and advocate for front-end best practices across the team.

·        Make broad contributions to the website and/or mobile application

Requirements

·        Bachelor’s degree in STEM or equivalent field plus 9+ years of relevant experience

·        Significant experience as a technical lead. You have led on the design, implementation and iteration of a publicly deployed product

·        Expert knowledge of JavaScript, modern libraries, and tooling

·        Deep understanding of several client/server architectures/frameworks

·        Experience building and consuming web-based APIs

·        Great communications skills

·        Solid knowledge of web technologies, such as JavaScript, CSS, HTML5, XML, JavaScript, JSON, Ajax or TypeScript

·        Experience using ReactJS, Flux, Redux, ReactNative and/or Ember.js, Node.js for Front End focused positions

·        Understanding of object-oriented programming language (Java, Javascript, C++, C#, Ruby, Python)

·        Excellent communication skills

·        Experience in a startup environment dealing with ambiguity

Benefits

·        Health care, stock options and more benefits to be announced soon.

Our culture

Led by two seasoned entrepreneurs with engineering and business backgrounds, we are creating a team with a strong design and UX orientation. We value blending design and engineering innovation to create fun and delightful experiences.

We have done this before. We know how to build highly effective teams and a company culture that is a joy to be part of on a daily basis. We believe that to create fun and engaging experiences we need to have a lot of fun building them.

We pay full-time salaries and offer competitive health benefits. We value diversity across all dimensions and keep reasonable hours. Playful Software is in-person in Seattle and remote everywhere.

Our hiring process

Our interview process is a straight-forward, behavioral interview about your past experiences, a small design task that will take less than one day of work, interviews with the founders and key staff, and meeting with our whole team. We value design and engineering excellence, product insight, eagerness for growth/impact, and the communication skills and empathy to collaborate well with a tight-knit team.

Founders

Darrin Massena and Mike Harrington are passionate about making software that is fun and easy to use. From gaming to productivity, Darrin and Mike have built successful teams and startups and have roots in the game industry. Mike co-founded Valve Software and Darrin co-founded Spiffcode. Darrin and Mike teamed up to create the award-winning online photo editor, Picnik, which was acquired by Google in 2010.

Company Description

Playful Software is on a mission to make it fun for non-technical users to create their own sites and apps. Whether it’s an interactive meme to post to social media, a private app to connect directly with family or friends, or a community-developed app to bring people together, we want to help you have fun making it and finding your audience. At Playful Software, we see a great opportunity to build a new class of creative tools that will enable a vibrant creative community to create rich expressions that include video, animation, and interactivity. Led by two seasoned entrepreneurs with engineering and business backgrounds, we are creating a team with a strong design and UX orientation. We value blending design and engineering innovation to create fun and delightful experiences. We have done this before. We know how to build highly effective teams and a company culture that is a joy to be part of on a daily basis. We believe that to create fun and engaging experiences we need to have a lot of fun building them. We pay full-time salaries and offer competitive health benefits. We value diversity across all dimensions and keep reasonable hours. Playful Software is in-person in Seattle and remote everywhere.