Senior Android Developer in a very well-funded new startup - Madrid [Staffed on 2017 Feb. 8th]

09 - December - 2016
The Challenge

The road transportation industry has been stuck in the same way of doing things for the past 30 years, with complex over-the-phone transactions that could be sped up and more efficient using the right technology. Our client is a new European start-up devoted to bringing the road transportation industry to the 21st century. They realised that, despite how present mobile technology is in our day-to-day lives, it hasn't yet reached such a critical industry. Their initial product is a B2B platform to streamline the finding of the right carrier for your freight. You can think of it as an Uber for trucks.

The team

  • Every one of us has had several start-up experiences and on average we have 10+ years of experience in somehow similar challenges. We know success, we know failure; we've built platforms from scratch, we've dealt with large legacy systems. We care about each other and about the product we're building.
  • Some of the past projects where our engineers have been involved before joining us are: building the billing system for one of the largest telephony operators in Spain, building up and optimising complex marketplaces handling millions of orders a month, building real time video chats, building a global identity provider, improving the garbage collector of the JVM, creating social network libraries even before Facebook existed, building the Eurofighter simulator used to train pilots, building kernel modules to deal with real-time processor allocation, creating NLP algorithms to score user comments and timeline recommendation algorithms, building software to manage a backbone network and dealt with the logistic platform of a big supermarket chain.
  • Investors like our concept and team and we've been quite successful in fundraising and gathering resources to support our future growth.

The engineering culture

  • We value speed of iteration and best practices and we care about our craft: both our API and key JavaScript code have 100% test coverage, for instance.
  • We get engineers as close to the business problems as possible, so everybody can be involved in product decisions. We have mechanisms to enable anybody in the company to bring their new ideas to decision makers since we believe that innovative ideas come from everywhere.

The stack

  • We have a decoupled architecture, based on REST APIs and asynchronous services. We work with React in the frontend platforms (customers and admin), native in mobile apps (drivers), Python/Django in the backend and we're currently evaluating Elixir for some services. Our DB is PostgreSQL and the queues run on RabbitMQ.
  • We use a dedicated ERP to avoid reinventing the wheel there and we also have built a DWH/Analytics platform which takes advantage of external solutions.

The profile

  • You're not afraid of tough challenges, both product-wise and technical, and like to contribute your views.
  • You've built complex apps, apps from scratch, apps alone, apps in a team. You know all the tricks of the trade and are absolutely comfortable developing, testing, deploying and debugging Android apps.
  • You care about both the UX and the technical aspects of an app and follow industry trends and app development innovations.
  • You care about the product you're building and the problem you're solving, not just about the technology you're using. You pride yourself in choosing the best technical solution for a problem by taking all constraints into account.
  • You prefer working in a fast-paced start-up, with quick iterations, changes of direction, tight budgets, and chaos over a hierarchical, well-structured corporation with clear and well-defined assignments, and career paths.

The offer

  • An office in downtown Madrid (Chamberí).
  • A laid-back culture where everybody is encouraged to participate in discussions and contribute.
  • Opportunities for personal growth and learning (we hold regular tech talks and encourage working on different parts of the platform).
  • Good salaries and stock options packages. We want our engineers to have ownership and participate in company success.
  • Flexible schedule (though no regular remote working since we believe in face-to-face communication).

 

Contact

Sebastien Sanz, Ayova Executive Search | sebastien@ayova.com (ref: "OT1216")