Senior Software Developer

Employees at SoundCloud, Duolingo, GetYourGuide and many more use Small Improvements for regular check-ins with their managers, peer feedback, goal setting, and to give each other positive feedback.

Do you want to help make work a better place? You can support us in our mission by shaping and evolving our product vision, and building and implementing the features to get us there.

We’re a passionate and friendly team of 15 people mainly based in Berlin, with some colleagues working remotely in the US. We don’t take ourselves too seriously and work is rarely boring with all our different nationalities and backgrounds.

We’re looking for a Senior Software Developer (but also open to a great mid-level dev) to join our team in Berlin. It’s a full-time position, and after the first 6 months, we can also offer four days per week. We’re a remote-friendly company and are open to applicants that live in Germany or have a work permit for Germany (unfortunately we can’t offer relocation support or visa assistance) and are willing to relocate to Germany. Work from home or in the office it’s completely up to you.

We are offering a starting salary of 60,000€ – 80,000€ depending on experience and subject to market rate.

Learn more about our development team at our tech blog, where you will also find interviews with our developers.

Our development team currently consists of five developers. You will join them in maintaining and improving our product. We work in a Scrum environment and our sprints are well organized.

More specifically, you will:

• Dive into the existing codebase and improve our features
• Define and develop new features together with the team based on customer feedback, your expertise and perhaps data you manage to find (e.g. in our BigQuery based data warehouse)
• Maintain our application by fixing bugs and ideally making sure they never reappear
• Work directly with our customers to support them and gather feedback
• Contribute to the company strategy, at Small Improvements everyone is expected to care about and contribute to who we are and what we do as a company
• Work with all teams to streamline our processes and structures for high efficiency and transparency

We’re looking for someone who likes to get things done and who loves working with different people and can inspire and mentor others, but is also humble and always tries to learn from others as well.

To be successful we think the following is important:

• Advanced knowledge of object-oriented programming and modern frontend development. Ideally with extensive experience of Java, Spring, TypeScript and React, but if you worked with similar technologies and believe you can quickly learn the mentioned and other parts of our full tech stack, that is also OK.
• Basic knowledge of interaction design. There’s no need to be an expert, but what you build should be usable and you should be able to reason about its usability.

• Passionate about great architecture and clean code. We have a monolithic application and use many ideas from DDD, Clean Architecture, Software Crafts(wo)manship and Functional Programming to name a few.

• You see programming as a tool to create value for our customers, and you are mature enough as a developer to know the cost of technical debt.
• Great at communication. Our developers occasionally join customer calls or give support directly to our customers. But of course, we also communicate a lot with each other and other parts of the organization.
• As the majority of our customers are based in the US, we work with colleagues and customers from all over the world. You’ll need to be comfortable with delays and time constraints from working with stakeholders across multiple time zones.

We don’t like to put limits on years of experience as our focus is on the actual skills. Our best guess would be that you have worked as a software developer for at least 5 years.

• We’re international: We sell mainly to the US and to Australia, and all our written communication is in English.
• We’re self-funded and profitable — our only “investors” are our amazing customers who have helped us grow our customer base largely through word of mouth.
• We balance life at work with life outside of work, and we don’t believe in overtime.
• We’re serious about our open and tolerant company culture, and we believe diversity makes our culture and our product better.
• We want to do well by doing good, so we turn down dodgy clients and donate 2% of our profits to charity.
• Our office near Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz in Berlin is stylish yet cozy, if you’d like to work from there.
• There are free snacks, fresh fruit, juices, tea and lemonades, you can make your own lattes with our amazing coffee machine, and we never run out of Club Mate.

Let us know why Small Improvements sounds interesting to you and how you think your experience and knowledge fits this role. You can include a CV or a link to your LinkedIn if you feel that’s equivalent. Please also include at least one example of a challenging project you worked on and explain why it was challenging and why you are proud of the end result, if possible with at least some technical details. If you have a Github account with some public code, please include it!

Please send us your relevant details to careers@small-improvements.helpscoutapp.com