Senior Product Engineer

Product Engineers at Co:Helm are typically engineers from any background or discipline that can demonstrate a strong “sense of product” through their desire and ability to solve problems close to the customer. Typically, they will posses skills that can be utilised across the stack which empowers them to build products that:

• are robust, secure, scalable and generally follow OWASP principals
• are delightful to use and have some level of “polish”
• showcase thoughtful interface design; whether that be OOP Classes, a REST API or a web Dashboard
• use software engineering best practises including DRY code, modular and extensible architecture and pragmatic algorithms to execute business logic

These engineers carry a level of competency that allows them to comfortably work on full-stack features whilst managing their own stakeholders, time and deadlines. For example, a Product Engineer could be asked to “add a button to delete a record from the Dashboard” and build a feature that considers:

• appropriate and thoughtful design to where and how the button will appear on the screen
• the size, color, text color and placement of the button based on known characteristics of the User
• loading states, confirmation dialogues and error states where appropriate
• an API that follows best practises for interface design, documentation and security
• a middleware layer that executes appropriate validation before processing the request
• an abstracted business logic layer that appropriately modularises code for re-use
• a business logic layer that sequentially executes dependent tasks, whilst parallelizing some for performance
• a business logic layer that eagerly executes tasks that are not CPU-intensive and queues more intensive workloads on a separate background thread
• an API that notifies the User of work done, and work to be done as appropriate
• a database or ORM that considers edge cases for processing transactions such as cascading deletions, database timeouts and race conditions
• the business case of whether the Delete Button should hard-delete a record, soft-delete a record or archive a record — and any further downstream considerations that need to be taken

We attribute the Senior title to engineers that have demonstrable technical competency and also the soft-skills to be team players. This includes being a good mentor to teammates whilst remaining coachable yourself. It also means you are able to build full-stack features as highlighted above, whilst also knowing when to ask for help and how to ask for it.

Full-stack engineers often have an identity crisis understanding what “full-stack” truly means and where their contributions are most impactful. At Co:Helm we love full-stack engineers because the broader technical knowledge allows these individuals to carry more empathy towards other stakeholders. To illustrate this point, consider how a full-stack engineer is more aware of the challenges of building a JSON endpoint for file uploads vs a form-data endpoint: A JSON payload is often much easier to ingest on the backend, however it requires the front-end to encode the file into a base64 representation or equivalent. Equally, POSTing a file using form-data is straight forward using browser APIs yet additional boilerplate code needs to be written for interpolation between JSON data driving the display logic and being shared with a backend service.

You are not expected to be a master at everything, so don’t expect everything to tick all the requirements mentioned on this page. Instead, focus on your strengths. We often find Product Engineers heavily lean towards the backend or the front-end, and very rarely have mastery of both ends.

We assess Product Engineers as full-stack developers that possess deep empathy for users based on the following rubric. Please note, this rubric is not exhaustive and is designed to be indicative of broad criteria we assess for.

Our assessment process is made up of 4 steps:

1. Technical test: A take-home assignment for you to demonstrate your full-stack ability to solve a constrained problem representative of the work you will do at Co:Helm
2. In-person technical interview: An opportunity for you to present your take-home assignment as well as have a technical discussion with somebody on the Co:Helm engineering team. This stage may include a peer-programming task based on your take-home assignment.
3. In-person cultural interview: A chance to speak with others on the Co:Helm team primarily to assess whether you’re a good person we’d like to bring onboard and whether you also believe we’re good people and you’d like to work alongside us
4. Final-stage interview: A final interview with the hiring manager or engineering lead before we make a decision
5. Work trial (optional): Hiring is hard, and we appreciate our process is not for everyone. In some cases, we’ll need some more data points to make a decision and we’ll invite you to come and work alongside us. This is a great opportunity for both sides to assess true fit as we build features and squash bugs together! This is a paid exercise and can be arranged to last between half a day and three months dependent on your interview performance and personal circumstances.

We are hiring Product Engineers on a rolling basis. If you are interested in applying, please download and complete the Take Home Assessment linked below: