On being a Team Happiness Engineer at balena

At balena, we spend a lot of time working to ensure that our team is cared for. As our team grows, we want to make sure that this is the case, which means working on interesting and rewarding challenges!

One of our priorities in terms of team happiness is to optimise team scheduling. We’re a remote-first company distributed across many continents, and as a result, scheduling meetings and ensuring we always have engineers available to support our users is a difficult challenge.

We believe it’s important to ensure that every member of the team is able to choose their working hours and maintain a healthy work-life balance, which means taking these parameters into account when scheduling.

As you may have read on our blog, we achieve this through the use of advanced constraint programming algorithms. This turns a task which would be tedious and inefficient to do by hand into a rewarding mathematical challenge which simultaneously results in a better and more flexible outcome for our team.

Algorithmic scheduling is of course just one example of pain reduction for the team. We have more ideas on how tools like constraint solvers can be applied to boost team happiness and success, for example the optimisation of team activities and professional development.

We are looking for a full stack “team happiness” engineer to join us in this venture by innovating and implementing engineering solutions to reduce discomfort and friction across our team. We can’t wait to see what you can come up with!

Requirements

Extremely good problem-solving abilities. You know how to split a complex problem into incremental pieces.

The software engineering skills to implement these solutions programmatically.

The ability to execute and complete software projects.

Good understanding of software engineering practices and how to apply them (e.g. version control, tests, descriptive commit messages).

Self-motivation to find the best possible outcome from a myriad of options.

Desire to make yourself and others more effective; you’d be bothered by an inefficient process.

Excellent written communication skills, and fluency in English.

The ability to work remotely, with a remote team around the world.

The candour to question the status quo.







Nice to have:

Experience with Linux, TypeScript, JavaScript frameworks, Python, HTML/CSS and databases

Experience with Google Sheets, Google Apps Script, and managing projects on the Google Cloud Platform.

A good understanding of git and GitHub.

An interest in mathematical modelling, optimisation and constraint solvers.

A sample of your work (URL or attached sample).

Experience in a full stack developer role.

Having worked remotely before.

About working at balena

We come from 15+ countries, and we embrace a remote culture with flexible hours. To us, this means being highly productive while still maintaining a healthy work-life balance. You need to be able to work remotely, and have a dependable internet access available so you can join video calls.

We are an equal opportunity employer and value diversity. We value knowledge and initiative more than educational and personal backgrounds, age, or location. We maintain a work environment in which team members are treated with respect at all times and in which thoughts and ideas can be shared openly.

We communicate proposals, discuss with others in the team and accept feedback if it makes the result better. We value the ability to learn, which is more important to us than knowledge of specific technologies. We know that learning fast means being outside our comfort zone, which is OK — we'd rather learn than let our assumptions get in our way.

Benefits