Staff Software Engineer

Staff Software Engineer

Software Engineering

Improving is committed to building a great place to work by cultivating an environment that fosters professional and personal relationships. We value open communication, personal growth, and shared rewards, which result in sustainable success.

Voted best place to work numerous times, Improving strives to create and maintain a culture that exemplifies teamwork, excellence, and fun. We believe this kind of culture encourages both the inspiration and the motivation to achieve amazing things.

Job Type: Full-Time

Location: Vancouver, BC

Country: Canada Note: This role is only open to residents of BC

Improving Vancouver’s data and cloud team has been building strong relationships and expert technical knowledge with clients such as start-ups and established multi-nationals since 2017. From architecture to infrastructure to low level connector, we innovate and build out the world's data ecosystems. We value kindness, engagement, a resourceful perspective, and fresh ideas. We thrive on crafting technical excellence.

A Staff Developer at Improving Vancouver is a go-to for one or more technologies, not necessarily having all the answers as much as being able to navigate the ecosystems of their area(s) of specialty. The interview approach we take for a Staff Developer addresses the technical mentor role you have played, but also the value you bring to the table as a specialist in one or more technologies. You can look forward to rich discussion and the mutual sharing of technology Pro Tips and insights. Your interviewers are smart and caring people who want to help you feature your valuable skills and abilities. Furthermore we value your opinions, insights and questions and encourage you to share them both in anonymous surveys or within the direct discussions.

New members can expect an exceptional onboarding experience where you'll get to know everybody in the company, our various internal programs for learning and sharing new technologies among the team, and work with your manager to make sure you are supported in your way of work and in your career growth. Your learning, your growth are critically important to us and we look forward to growing together.

As a Staff Developer you'll be given autonomy and trust to: scope and author designs for moderately complex features and drive to completion, spanning multiple months, including implementation, testing, and release; collaborate and coordinate with the team, delegating to other team members, ensuring their success; reach out to our external customers to discuss topics or answer questions; actively mentor direct team members and others within the company; be a subject matter expert for multiple areas within the company and proactively share that expertise with other teams and developers, thereby directly influencing them to achieve successful results; support other developers across the company who may seek you out as a trusted source for your subject matter expertise; drive one or more features within the team with minimal guidance; independently come up with a vision to solve a complex problem and get buy-in with our stakeholders, including external customers and technical staff, to realize that vision.

Technical Acumen Responsibilities include hands-on technical oversight of assigned client projects, including ownership for design, coding, reviews, testing and documentation; becoming educated on project technologies to provide technical guidance to both our team and customer; recognizing and specifying all areas where tests should be written and ensuring they are completed for each project; owning code quality and actively participating in code reviews; writing complete and correct tests for all development projects and setting up test frameworks where appropriate; efficiently writing clear and concise programs that are maintainable, readable, portable where appropriate, testable, and documented; meeting programming standards by following production, productivity, quality, and customer-service standards.

Delivery and Execution responsibilities include leading the team for assigned client projects to successful technical and deliverable outcomes; taking ownership of projects, prioritizing and managing time effectively to meet schedules, including delegating tasks to other developers and asking for help from developers or management; guiding the team and operating independently to efficiently deliver results; gathering specifications from clients on projects and authoring scope of work documents that lay out deliverables, milestones and assumptions requiring time estimation and technical scope definition with customer refinement; input on progress tracking and resource assignment; fostering highly productive collaboration within your team on assigned projects; using clear and timely communication to ensure the team and clients are well informed at all times.

Leadership responsibilities include providing active feedback to developers within the company to ensure continuous growth; being a subject matter expert in multiple areas for the company; following and leading efforts in improving company best practices, knowledge base, policies and processes to ensure the company is best positioned to satisfy client requirements; leading by example in pursuing projects that require learning new technologies and continually expanding your skills in terms of both process, technology, and language; leading with proposals and solutions to challenges and issues; participating in the recruitment process to grow both the size and number of reporting teams; participating in the development of an inclusive, helpful, fun environment.

Qualifications

• B. Sc. in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or equivalent relevant experience.

• 4+ years experience in a technical leadership role within a team.

• 7+ years of industry experience with object-oriented programming in C++ or Java, both a plus.

• Development experience on Windows and macOS, Linux a plus.

• Experience documenting software design.

• Experience defining and estimating software development requirements.

• Experience writing tests, both unit and integration.

• Excellent communication skills, both written and verbal.

• Hard working and passionate about technology.

• Ability to work independently and provide leadership to the team.

• Proven record of successful on-time delivery of projects with a high degree of predictability and quality.

• Experience mentoring others in design, coding, reviews, test and software development best practices.

• Experience with Big Data and/or NoSQL experience.

• Experience in SQL, databases and database connectivity.

• Experience creating cloud-hosted infrastructure on AWS, Azure, and/or GCP.

• Ability to travel to the US.

• Nice to Haves

• Experience with remote customer stakeholders and development teams.

• Ability to foster relationships in order to expand opportunities with our clients.

• Flexible to adapt to various methodologies depending on the client's way of working.

• Experience working with an IDE such as Visual Studio, Visual Studio Code, IntelliJ, and Eclipse.

• Experience using C++ memory management and performance analysis tools.

• Experience working with C#, JavaScript/Typescript, Node.js, and/or Python.

• Exposure to authentication and access technologies such as SSO, OAuth, SAML, LDAP a plus.

• Improving welcomes people from all backgrounds and walks of life, and this is reflected in our largely diverse community of Improvers. Improving is proud to be an equal opportunity employer and is committed to providing equal opportunities for all employees and applicants. Improving recruits, hires, trains, promotes, compensates, and administers all personnel actions without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sex stereotyping, pregnancy, gender, gender identity, gender expression, national origin, age, mental or physical disability, ancestry, medical condition, marital status, military or veteran status, citizenship status, sexual orientation, genetic information, or any other status protected by applicable law.

• About Improving

• Improving is a modern digital services company dedicated to positively changing the perception of the IT professional. We offer innovative solutions through consulting, software development, and training to help thousands of our clients achieve new heights in a competitive and ever-changing market.

• As our company continues to grow, we are looking for enthusiastic thought leaders to join our team. Improving has a unique mix of passionate professionals who strive to grow and thrive in new ways. We are committed to establishing and maintaining an inclusive culture that allows all Improvers to be