On being a product engineer at balena

All team members at balena are laser-focused on our mission: enabling developers to succeed in IoT and edge computing by helping them deploy and manage tens of thousands of devices across the globe.

As a product engineer, you will act as a product visionary and full-stack engineer at the same time — proactively identifying opportunities and seeing new features throughout the entire lifecycle from design to deployment and maintenance. You will own product outcomes, not feature requests, and take into careful consideration balena’s complex, interdependent systems when developing solutions. You will build a deep understanding of what the product is now and what it needs to be in the future, and help inform tradeoff and prioritization decisions. Above all, you will get your hands dirty and build cross-platform capabilities to remove friction for our users.

You will get inspiration both from the balena team and by actively communicating with users to understand how we can better address their needs, anticipate roadblocks and maximize the added value of a feature or solution for them. You will be empowered to take on a user request and own its implementation across any part of the stack — whether that's front-end, back-end, infrastructure, etc. You will solve hard architectural riddles and answer questions like “How do I build this? How does it all fit together?”

You will work both independently and with engineers, designers, product leads, and more in the service of improving users' lives, without regard for internal silos or barriers. You will communicate proposals, discuss with others in the team, incorporate feedback, and drive positive change.

Responsibilities

• Talk to users to understand their current and future needs, filter user feedback, analyze product issues, produce requirements, and develop implementations that will enable our users to effectively manage the health of their own fleets
• Help inform the product roadmap and contribute to prioritization and tradeoff discussions when deciding what to build and focus on
• Lead the development of new user-centric features across the balena product stack
• Contribute to documentation and user-facing guides for the implementations you develop
• Work closely with the customer success team and engineers on support; you’ll often be asked to lend your expertise and contribute to internal docs/scratchpad to extract your knowledge and educate others
• Constantly question how we can address user needs with long-term product improvements and developments, rather than short-term fixes. Look for ways we can abstract feedback and build generic solutions for all users

Requirements

• Breadth of experience, having worked on front-end, back-end and whatever it takes to make users successful and delighted
• Up-to-date software engineering knowledge and problem-solving skills (both in development and in production mode)
• Customer-facing skills; ability to understand user needs through conversation and product intuition, articulate their challenges to the team, and build and deploy solutions
• Drive for execution, taking ownership and pushing projects to completion
• Humbleness to ask for support from experts within the team when their particular skills are required
• Ability to both hold the big picture in mind and dive into the weeds
• Being curious and willing to constantly build on your knowledge of the balena product and new technologies when needed
• Continuous improvement mindset and desire to make yourself and others more effective
• Being comfortable working in an environment that practices radical candor and transparency
• Excellent communication skills and fluency in English

Bonus points

• Experience with technologies like Typescript, React, Node.js, Docker, PostgreSQL, or Kubernetes
• Experience leading software projects or bringing people together to collaborate and build great products
• Contributions to OSS projects (please include a URL)
• Interest in embedded systems as demonstrated through personal projects with a Raspberry Pi, commercial or industrial experience with connected devices, etc.
• Experience with balena as a user
• Having worked remotely before

Make sure to let us know if any of these items apply to you. If possible, please also share a sample of your work (URL or attachment).

To apply

We strongly recommend that you have a look at/try our platform first (set up a balenaCloud account, test it and even push an app). Along with your CV/Resume, please answer the questions in our application form to help us get the context right.