Chicago, Any
Software Engineer III
We’re hiring a Software Engineer III to join our team. Our Level 3 Software Engineers are independent team members who can not only organize their own daily work in a productive manner but also effectively estimate their work and stay aware of prioritization on their projects. Read on to learn about us, what it’s like to work with us, what we’re looking for, and our hiring process.
Who we are
Tandem is a technology and innovation studio that specializes in product definition, custom software, and software managed services. We create custom software that inspires people and drives business forward. As a talented group of thinkers and makers from many disciplines, we are brought together by a shared goal: bring talented designers and engineers together to solve meaningful business problems. We always focus first on people — our clients, their customers, and our team — by collaborating to solve meaningful business challenges. We enjoy designing and building ambitious digital products and tools.
What it’s like to work with us
As a consultancy, we have the opportunity to solve a lot of different problems. We work directly with our clients in small teams, building and providing guidance on products, and collaborating with designers. Our unique approach to consulting leads to a better developer experience and a higher quality of work life.
As engineers, we love well-tested, maintainable, and clean code! We are always encouraging each other to write better code through pair programming and code reviews. We’re generalists and strive to make sure that we’re choosing the best technology to solve our clients’ problems. Right now we’re loving Postgres, Rails, and React as our greenfield tech stack, but we occasionally have projects in the Python, Java, .NET, Node, iOS, or ReactNative ecosystems. Nothing is off-limits, so we never turn down the opportunity to learn a new technology!
Our vision is to create a supportive, collaborative environment and empower people to deliver work they’re proud of. At Tandem, everyone teaches and everyone learns. Egos are low, and we're all genuinely interested in seeing everyone else succeed.
Who you are
We would love to hear from you if you
- Have an advanced proficiency in at least 1 full stack, including relational database, server-side framework, and client-side framework
- Have experience making relational data modeling decisions
- Believe in continuous integration and continuous development
- Have experience working in an agile development process
- Love to learn and look at challenges as learning opportunities
- Value a breadth of knowledge and enjoy being a generalist developer
- Delight in problem solving and strive to make the best decisions for the problem and information at hand
- Are excited about software testing and always ship well-tested code
- Align with our core values and genuinely want to do work that makes a positive impact
In this role, you will...
Our career levels and responsibilities are cumulative. For a full list of responsibilities, please check out our Software Engineering Career Path.
Responsibilities
- Consistently produce high quality work that may require only minor adjustments
- Take ownership of larger portions of a project and/or code base as a subject matter expert (SME)
- Demonstrate leadership abilities within your project team
- Support project leads (Senior or Principal Engineers) proactively
- Actively participate in helping to craft estimates and engage in forward project planning
- Lead phone screens, code reviews, and interviews for new candidates
Technical Skills
- Work on high complexity features, such as those that integrate multiple systems or call out to a third party, independently
- Effectively debug high complexity issues in the code using a systematic approach, with some coaching and pairing assistance from other team members. High complexity issues are those where the remediation steps are unknown and may require large refactors or multi-level system changes.
- Execute medium complexity refactors, such as those that touch multiple components within many layers of the application
- Model data for medium complexity features, such as those that require join tables
- Consistently deliver code with test coverage for all of the primary functionality and some of the non-primary functionality, striving for at least 75% coverage
- Deliver code with error handling for user input and other critical data errors in integral parts of application functionality
- Consistently write useful abstractions to increase code reusability and extensibility
- Provide detailed documentation for your work most of the time, including PR descriptions, commit messages, README updates, or content in the project management tool, with some coaching and pairing assistance from other team members
- Communicate your opinions on technical matters and explain the justifications behind your implementation decisions, appropriate to constraints of relevant requirements
- Decompose complex requirements into constituent parts and document these tasks as effective stories
- Provide supportive, specific, actionable design and product feedback and suggest feasible alternatives
- Provide supportive, specific, actionable technical feedback to other team members in PR and code reviews, and identify areas for refactoring, while providing high-level implementation direction
Professional & Consulting Skills
- Proactively manage scope with an eye towards timeline and budget, with some coaching and pairing assistance from other team members
- Produce realistic estimates for your individual scope of work at the story level. You explain assumptions, risks, and unknowns for your estimates.
- Explain trade-offs in your decision making, with some coaching and pairing assistance from other team members
- Identify scope creep and escalate to your team. Offer alternatives to the team and present those alternatives to the client.
- Explain technical and business decisions to clients
- Lead client calls and negotiate scope with the client when necessary, with some coaching and pairing assistance from other team members
- Manage client expectations and have difficult conversations with clients, with some coaching and pairing assistance from other team members
- Find opportunities to unblock your team members’ work some of the time
- Reliably complete necessary project management tasks in addition to technical tasks
- Manage “up” to project leads and more senior members of the team with tact and effectiveness
- Handle risk, change, and uncertainty within your personal scope of work effectively. Handle uncertainty within project scope of work effectively and supports team members through the uncertainty, with some coaching and pairing assistance from other team members
How we work and our benefits
We care deeply about our team and strive to provide flexibility and benefits so each person can prioritize the things they care about.
For example, our core working hours are from 10am-4pm in your local time zone. The goal of core hours is to ensure that we can pair and collaborate in a high-bandwidth way during the majority of our workday while allowing us the flexibility that real life requires. You may notice that 10am-4pm for five days doesn't add up to 40 hours - yet 40 is generally what we expect to do. How you organize your work time outside of core hours is at your discretion, whether this is early mornings, late evenings, or weekends (though weekend work is not recommended).
Our other benefits include
- Healthy work/life balance with no overtime requests
- Competitive annual salary
- 100% employer paid medical, dental, and vision plans for employee, spouse, and family
- 100% employer paid life insurance policy
- 100% employer paid short-term and long-term disability insurance
- 3 weeks of paid time off to start, increasing by 1 week each year up to 5 weeks off
- 3 paid conference days each year
- Annual learning budget for conferences, courses, online training, books, etc.
- Eligibility to enroll in the Tandem retirement plan with 3% employer matching after 6 months of employment
Our hiring process
We use a 4 step process.
- Application
- Phone screen
- Take home code challenge
- Remote in-person interview
The first step in our process is to fill out our application form. You will be asked a few questions on that form. We value thoughtful responses and will disregard applications without them.
If we decide to move forward, we’ll follow up with you to schedule an initial phone screen with one of our engineers. Our phone screens are non-/low-technical. We won’t be grilling you on database design but are interested in learning about your career trajectory, professional experiences, and what interests you.
If that goes well, we’ll send you our take-home code challenge. We know that everyone has different responsibilities and priorities in life, and we want to give you the time you need to shine. You will have 10 days to complete your challenge and submit it.
Once submitted, we’ll do an internal code review to determine if we’d like to do an in-person interview. If we choose not to move forward, we’re happy to schedule a call for feedback.
Finally, the last step in our process is a remote in-person interview. You’ll have the chance to meet with many of our team members, extend your code challenge, pair with us on real clients and problems that we’re solving that day, and participate in a consulting challenge.
Who you’ll be working with
Tandem's team members come from diverse and nontraditional backgrounds. We support one another in our careers, and are working to achieve inclusivity across the technology industry. Learn more about our culture on the Tandem blog:
- We've embraced salary band transparency and ensure our accountability through regular independently conducted pay equity audits
- We pair program every day and prioritize empathy in our pairing practices
- We build each other up and combat imposter syndrome, stereotype threat, and the confidence gap
We don’t want to miss great candidates. Don’t let doubt deter you from joining our team. Don’t know what level you should apply for? Check out our career paths for common benchmarks to help you determine what level is best for you.
PLEASE NOTE: applications which do not include thoughtful responses to our application questions will be disregarded.
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