Senior Back-end Engineer Coach, Top Academy Team

About Toptal

Toptal is a global network of top freelance talent in business, design, and technology that enables companies to scale their teams, on-demand. With $200+ million in annual revenue and over 40% year-over-year growth, Toptal is the world’s largest fully remote company.

We take the best elements of virtual teams and combine them with a support structure that encourages innovation, social interaction, and fun. We see no borders, move at a fast pace, and are never afraid to break the mold.

Position Description

Providing a phenomenal web user experience is essential to us, and we’re always looking for hardworking back-end web developers to take us to the next level.

By joining our team, you’ll get the opportunity to work on many of our projects with a team of highly skilled back-end experts from around the world. At Toptal, we push the boundaries of the web every single day, and we’d love for this person to help us take us even further. The bulk of the work we do is pure back-end development, but some front-end skills will help you. We don’t cut corners, and we don’t make compromises—we build appealingly designed web apps that are polished, fast, well-tested, and a joy to use.

We are remote-only, have no office, and fully embrace a flexible work-life balance. All communication and resumes must be submitted in English.

This is a remote position that can be done from anywhere. Due to the remote nature of this role, we are unable to provide visa sponsorship. Resumes and communication must be submitted in English.

TopAcademy is an initiative within TopTal that became a platform for the training and development of our interns and inexperienced talents. We will provide hands-on training guided by senior back-end engineers. We are looking for candidates who would feel comfortable mentoring and coaching junior roles. Part of their tasks would be to guide our interns into their path—providing effective, specific, timely, meaningful, and candid feedback.

You will also help us build a platform that will support the learning and development of our interns. We aim to build the best academy platform for providing a world-class experience to our interns.

Responsibilities:

• Translate designs and requirements into code.
• Design, build and maintain elegant, efficient, reusable, and reliable Ruby code that is easy to maintain and debug.
• Work on the infrastructure part of the project, collaborating with infrastructure Engineers.
• Cover your code with tests and perform manual testing of your features.
• Train and coach junior members. Guide their professional growth.
• Review the work of your colleagues. Provide feedback on the quality of their work and guidance on how to improve and shape their skills.
• As a true teammate, you continuously improve your team’s processes, brainstorm ideas, and communicate your status and progress.
• Mentor other people, provide candid and specific feedback, and continuously improve yourself.

In the first week, expect to:

• Join our TopAcademy team and begin introductions to Toptal.
• Get acquainted with our tech stack.
• Be introduced to our working processes and product backlog.

In the first month, expect to:

• Start to contribute to software development at Toptal.
• Get a deeper understanding of our technology, processes, and product pipeline.
• Start working on mentoring and providing feedback in PRs.

In the first three months, expect to:

• Actively supply software planning, development, and maintenance.
• Be ready to propose improvements to Toptal’s processes and codebase.
• Review and improve the mentoring processes and be an owner of them.
• Start mentoring interns and providing them effective feedback.

In the first six months, expect to:

• Lead technical initiatives with the team. Like the creation of the platform.
• Lead the mentorship program and help us to build an excellent education path.
• Drive improvements to the codebase and processes.
• Be a reference for the interns and a true mentor for them.

In the first year, expect to:

• Have a detailed understanding of Toptal’s technical stack, collaboration rituals, processes, performance, and future work.
• Have a clear idea of your career path at Toptal.
• Not just improve the processes of mentoring and the TopAcademy standards. Own them.

Requirements:

• Have 5+ years of back-end web development experience—preference is given to candidates who have worked on large applications of some scale.
• Have 2+ years of web development experience with Ruby.
• Have a strong knowledge of object-oriented programming, automated software testing, databases, development, and testing essential methodologies.
• You have experience with consuming and designing REST and GraphQL APIs.
• Experience developing within a front-end language, e.g.: React, Typescript is a plus.
• Consider multiple quality dimensions like user impact, failure tolerance, code maintenance, implementation time, security breaches, and performance.
• Be genuinely interested in technology and love to try new things.
• Tackle complex problems but also consider multiple solutions, weigh them, and decide on the best course of action.
• You must be passionate about providing and receiving honest but constructive feedback.
• You must be a person who is passionate about mentoring others and helping others into their careers.
• You must be a world-class individual contributor to thrive at Toptal. You will not be here just to tell other people what to do.