Engineering Lead

Join our team as a Engineering Lead at blackbear, where you'll drive our technological vision and team growth. This role blends hands-on technical expertise with managerial responsibilities, allowing you to shape the future of our Tech team and blackbear’s technological landscape. 

About blackbear

Hi, I'm Joep, Co-Founder of blackbear. My Co-Founder Stefan and I launched blackbear to address a common challenge in today's labour market: the need for flexibility and quality in work. Our mission is to change the way the world gets work done.

We know the struggles faced in finding flexible work solutions - we’ve experienced it first-hand. That's why we're dedicated to bridging capacity gaps with tailored solutions by offering a platform ready for the future of work.

Our platform connects organizations with freelance talent, enabling flexible, secure, and efficient work without sacrificing quality. By blending agency and freelance work seamlessly, we're reshaping the future of work. At blackbear, we're not just filling capacity gaps; we're redefining how work gets done.

Blackbear is a scale-up with a distinct character. Everyone who works with us shares the same drive for excellence and growth. Now, as we gear up to take our services global, it's time to supercharge our tech efforts. We want to shake things up, push boundaries, and take our success to a whole new level.

Currently, we're transitioning our organisation to a product-centric approach and expanding our development team. If you're an experienced Engineering Lead eager to contribute your skills and creativity to our mission, we'd love to hear from you. Let's shape the future of work together!

About the role

At the core of our organisation lies a small yet dynamic Tech team that is on the brink of expansion. Currently the team consists of a Back-end Developer, a Front-end Developer, a QA Engineer, a UX/UI designer and a Product Owner.

With this ambitious group of individuals, we are on a mission to revolutionise the way work is done, and we are looking for an experienced leader who wants to combine their strong vision on Tech strategies with hands-on responsibilities to execute this vision and ensure operational excellence.

As Engineering Lead you will play a pivotal role in the growth and development of blackbear and our platform. You'll be at the helm of our technological endeavours and will work directly with key stakeholders, including our Co-Founders and our Management Team.

This role consists of hands-on leadership, guiding and mentoring a team of developers to deliver high-quality code and solutions, and working alongside the team to develop the features for our platform. Your primary responsibility will be to spearhead the development of new features for our web platform, ensuring a seamless end-to-end solution from conception to deployment.

Your responsibilities include:

• Leading our Engineering team: take charge of guiding a team of developers to deliver high-quality solutions, and mentoring them to ensure they keep challenging and developing themselves.
• Maintaining, developing, running & improving our platform: facilitate the team in technical and project delivery decisions and spearhead the development of new features for our web platform.
• Scaling our team: leverage your experience in leading teams within start-up environments to scale the team, foster innovation, and drive growth in a dynamic and fast-paced setting.
• Optimising operations: use your expertise in agile environments to increase team efficiency and collaboration, while optimizing and streamlining our processes within the team and with our stakeholders.
• Supporting the organisation: Identify, troubleshoot, solve complex problems logically and systematically to enable the organisation to grow and become more efficient.
• Driving solutions: collaborate within the team and with our stakeholders to translate ideas into unique, human experiences for current and future end-users.

Blackbear is a scale-up with a distinct character. Everyone who works with us shares the same drive for excellence and growth.

For this position, we are looking for the following:

• 6+ years of experience as developer and proven experience in a leadership role, both in managing IT projects and in guiding and mentoring a team of developers.
• Proficiency in MySQL, Vue3, and Tailwind CSS.
• In-depth knowledge of the Laravel ecosystem, common packages, and first-party components.
• The ability to deploy, maintain and monitor the health of our application.
• Vast experience with agile methodologies that allows you to improve our development processes to be as efficient as possible.
• A true passion for technology and a love for sparring about finding the right solution to a problem. You are open to ideas and are not afraid of sharing yours.
• Excellent stakeholder management skills throughout all levels of an organisation and with external clients and the ability to seamlessly bring ideas and opinions together into one solid advice or decision.
• A strong decision-maker who takes ownership of projects.
• Ability to balance strategy with hands-on involvement. You know how to translate needs and current challenges into Tech strategies and ideas, after which you implement these together with your team.
• You are available from June onwards and based in the Netherlands with the ability to commute to our office in Schiphol-Rijk.

About the team

Our Tech Stack

• We have a monolithic architecture, with good test coverage.
• Our main stack consists of PHP 8.3, Laravel, MySQL, Vue3, Typescript, and Tailwind.
• Our internal admin panel is built using Filament.
• We use tools and services including Linear, GitHub, Cloudflare, and Stripe.

Our Processes

We work using the Shape Up method, focusing on 2 - 6 week cycles to build impactful features that redefine how the working world collaborates. We use this method because we believe empowered teams drive real change. The entire team is involved in the process of shaping the solution.

Why we like it:

• Fixed time, variable scope: Say goodbye to estimations (let’s be honest, they are rarely realistic). We shape a solution and scope it to fit a given period of time so that we can deliver something valuable to our end users.
• Identify problems early: Product development teams have the tools necessary to define problems in detail before the work on solutions starts
• Protect focus: You get to focus on one single feature at the time as sole-focus. No bug fixing in between or other distractions.
• Fewer meetings: Minimum meetings and when we do, we make them matter.
• Time for us: Gives us time in between-cycles to do general housekeeping or learning new skills.

Our process isn't set in stone. We're still experimenting and open to identifying the most efficient recipe for continued success, you will play an important role in shaping this process.

What we build

You could describe our platform as a SaaS enabled Marketplace. 
These are the few of the exciting projects we have on our roadmap in the upcoming months:

• AI-job description: create a high-quality job description with minimum effort
• Real-time collaboration: seamless centralised communication & collaboration via our platform
• Vetted professionals: recommend & select the best professional for the job with minimum effort
• Professional pools: your preferred professionals ready & available to work with you
• Interactive product demos: let customers experience the value of our product early on
• Get Projects done with blackbear: professionals working in teams; splitting their earnings and deliver complex solutions
• Emails & campaigns: enable our teams to build fledged campaigns inside our platform to ensure customer success and tailored support for each account.

Here is a snapshot of our application:

What we offer

At blackbear, we embrace a strong sense of purpose, ownership, collaboration, and mutual trust - all driving us towards reaching our ambitious goals.

As Engineering Lead, you will get the unique opportunity to play a pivotal role in the future of blackbear and you will get the freedom to propose, shape and implement your ideas.

➡️ You’re part of one of the fastest-growing Tech companies in The Netherlands.

➡️ The opportunity to participate in our equity plans.

➡️ An annual personal development budget.

➡️ Vacation allowance of 8% paid on a monthly basis and 25 paid vacation days.

➡️ Pension plan contribution by blackbear and solid parental leave policies.

➡️ Commute reimbursements and working-from-home allowances.

➡️ Hybrid working: 3 days remote and 2 days in the office per week (our future is looking remote).
➡️ Great gear - a high-end laptop and whatever else you need to succeed. 

➡️ Healthy lunches and snacks are provided in our office.

➡️ An international working environment with driven colleagues and ample social activities.

Our recruitment process

1. Initial chat with our People Business Partner to discuss your motivation, experience and the position to assess if there is a mutual fit for the role.
2. An interview with our Head of Product to further discuss your profile and motivation for the role. Here you get the opportunity to deep-dive into the position, the team and the vision for the future.
3. A technical interview with our development team to understand your general motivation for the role, followed by a one-part coding exercise, completed as peer programming to assess your relevant technical experience and experience how we would collaborate.
4. Culture check. You will have a conversation with one of our founders to get a sense of what we’re planning as a company, assess the cultural fit and see what future opportunities can be in store for you. Additionally, you will have a meeting with the team to get to know each other and ensure there’s a personal and professional match.
5. Reference check.

Apply today, make an impact tomorrow

If our mission resonates with you, and you'd like to be part of a collaborative and innovative team driving a product's success, we'd love to hear from you. Please send us your CV and any relevant project links or repositories.