Engineering Manager

Engineering plays a very central part in the business.

As a company with ambitions to be a world-class API solution for all things tax, we value quality over quantity when building. We also care about creating scalable, easy-to-operate, and maintainable software that our customers and daily users can rely on.

Some pointers about our engineering culture:

• Engineers are given customer problems to solve rather than features to build.
• We understand the customer's needs before considering implementation details.
• Engineers are owners of their past, present and future; architecture, tools, coding, testing, deployment, operations and scaling
• We work in lean, small teams. We co-own the product roadmap with product managers
• We choose collaboration, compassion, and trust over individualism and politics
• We prefer innovation, constant iteration and trust over competition and perfect solutions.
• We support each other, are kind by nature, and give as much feedback as possible to improve as professionals.
• We break down complex problems and consistently seek the most straightforward solutions.
• We take quality and security seriously and factor it into everything we do.
• We are comfortable with change in terms of priorities, goals and deadlines. We see this more as an opportunity than a hurdle. We are not satisfied with the status quo and push for change.
• We seek those looking to make a severe impact and are excited about working in a high-growth startup.
• We ship fast, continuously, and iteratively, learning with each step.
• We are comfortable making mistakes. We don’t blame and consider every failure an opportunity to improve.
• We measure everything, use the data to make decisions, and influence the organization
• We don’t allow blockers to prevent us from delivery. We step out of our comfort zone to find the solution and collaborate with other teams to move the initiatives forward.

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Our products

We have a suite of API products that automate tax-related workflows for any internet company. Those products are Lookup, Tax, Returns, Data sharing and E-Invoicing.

We may discover novel customer needs as we learn and spin up new products as required.

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Our API docs

For you as an engineer, API documentation is probably an important part when considering a new career move. Thanks to the API docs, you can recognise how API works and how it is structured.

Please visit our API documentation and learn more about our API endpoints and how to use them - https://docs.fonoa.com/.

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Our Tech Stack

Fonoa has a suite of API products that automate tax-related workflows for any internet company. Check them out below:

• For the backend, we use Node and Go, with some legacy dotnet.
• For the front end, we use ReactJS and Typescript.
• For persistence, we use PostgreSQL and S3.
• We use Azure (for legacy serverless) and GCP for our cloud services.
• We manage our infrastructure with Terraform, Kubernetes CRDs, ArgoCD, Prometheus, and DataDog.

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“As an engineer, I follow a product through its lifecycle, from ideation to delivery and support, which gives a lot of exposure to the technology and customer needs. This allows me to learn to improve both myself and the product constantly.” - Philip Beel, Engineering Manager.

Job Responsibilities:

• Learn about how painful it is for companies to manually handle the tax lifecycle, and think about how our systems change the status quo.
• Run a product engineering team, aligning business objectives with technical delivery.
• Partnering with the Product Manager, co-owning the product roadmap
• Guiding on day-to-day tactical work, hiring, onboarding, developing and mentoring. Your success is your team’s success.
• Contribute to the wider engineering culture and goals, working on high-level strategy with other Engineering Managers and our CTO.
• Constantly think about building the best API product, experience and capabilities.

Job Requirements:

• You are fully proficient in English. Written and spoken, as we are a bunch from around the world, but we work in English.
• You optimise for distributed and asynchronous work, favouring documenting and taking notes over having ad-hoc face-to-face meetings that leave no trace and exclude the people who were not around at the right time.
• You have a strong sense of ownership, you care about what you build, and you are building the right thing that serves your customers.
• You focus on people; are able to hire the right people, distribute and organise, able to develop your team through constant feedback, keep them healthy and focus on retention
• You like to optimise processes to speed up product development without sacrificing quality.
• You’re a builder at heart. You like the opportunity of having tons of exposure, making things work for a company long-term, and having an entrepreneurial attitude for anything that comes your way.
• You are either eager to learn or comfortable scaling and operating large-scale microservices in high-load and growth environments.
• You are knowledgeable in a couple of languages. Most of our current codebase is in Go and Typescript
• You enjoy removing unused features more than shipping new things that no one cares about. You run away from success theatre.
• You ship small things fast, continuously, and iteratively, learning on each step.
• You like to use data over opinions to make decisions. And are okay with finding the data yourself when it’s missing.
• You are comfortable with change, either in priorities, goals or deadlines. You see this more as an opportunity than a hurdle. You are also comfortable with challenging the status quo and pushing for change.
• You’re looking to make a serious impact, and are excited about working in a high growth startup.