If you’re any good at Javascript, this is probably not the first job ad you’ve seen, so we’ve done our best to stand out while also accurately presenting what we’re all about. If it sounds like you would enjoy working with us, don’t hesitate to apply or drop us a line with questions on engineering-recruitment@silverfin.com

Ahum. Here it comes.

What’s a Silverfin?

At Silverfin we’re trying to apply the promise of software to the age-old industry of accounting. With our SaaS we’re automating a large chunk of the busy-work that accountants are currently handling manually, and are building new tools so they can provide better services to their customers. We aim to optimize their workflow in such a way that accountants can spend more time on the much more impactful and rewarding work of advising their customers, the business owners.

The good news is we’re succeeding in doing exactly that. Every day more than 15.000 financial service professionals use Silverfin to help and advise more than 200.000 businesses. Our customers adore us! The even better news is there’s still plenty left to work on, and that’s where we hope you come in.

What makes the engineering team at Silverfin special?

We’re a remote-first engineering team of 25 people distributed in 14 different countries. A priority for us is maintaining proper work-life balance. We avoid meetings as much as possible, accept deadlines only when absolutely necessary, and never expect anyone to work longer hours than they’ve signed up for. A day in our working lives is pretty boring in this regard, and we feel that’s exactly how it should be.

Working with us means you can be flexible with your schedule. It’s OK to disappear for a few hours in the middle of the day to run some errands, get a haircut, pick up the kids — whatever reason, you don’t need to explain yourself. You also fully decide when you take time off: our team is sufficiently varied and well organized that there are always enough people around to handle the load, and in the rare cases it’s not, we will decrease the load instead of asking people to move their holiday.

Being remote-first means we favor asynchronous communication. We don’t shy away from chatting in Slack, but the important decisions or discussions are done in Gitlab issues, over email, or in our wiki, so there’s a written, persisted record. We’re mindful of maintaining long chunks of focussed time, which means we avoid @-mentions or PMs on Slack, and other triggers and interrupts. We encourage using Slack’s DnD function, especially when you’re not working!

We’d be really happy to welcome you in our #dev channel, but it’s not just virtual: we make sure we regularly get to see each other in real life too. Twice a year we fly the whole engineering team together to a different location in Europe, and at least once a year we join up with the rest of the company so we can spend some time together with the other departments.

What does working at Silverfin look like?

We work in nimble teams around 5 people in size, with each team taking ownership of a specific set of features of the application. Teams are responsible for a full slice across the stack, so both the backend as well as the frontend of each part is maintained by the same people.

You’ll be supported by our UI designer who develops and maintains HTML and CSS components into a reusable UI-framework, and can also build Vue.js prototypes when necessary. You’ll often work together with them to tweak the look and feel before deploying new features and changes. For the more complex features we’ll often write a Proof-of-Concept (PoC) first so the product team can do usability tests with real users. This allows us to validate the assumptions we make during product design.

We use Vue.js, vanilla JS and a bit of jQuery for the interactive parts of our application, and an up-to-date Rails monolith for the backend. Rails also renders the html for the less interactive parts of the application. We use PostgreSQL and Redis for persistence and caching, and everything is running on a Kubernetes cluster in Google Cloud. Our daily tools include GitLab, Quip and Slack, with Zoom as our remote conferencing tool of choice.

No code gets deployed without a code-review by a peer and testing is a must. Our pipeline automates deployment when the suite is green, and deploys happen dozens of times a day. Each team is currently doing Kanban, but they’re free to follow whatever process suits them best. There are regular retros held to work towards continuous improvement.

Our ops team ensures things run smoothly, deploys happen correctly, and will work with you should issues arise. We’re enthusiastic followers of the devops mindset, which means ops and developers work together to solve problems, and empower each-other to be self-sufficient, instead of throwing problems over the wall to the “other side”.

Software for accountants is not considered to be very exciting, but we have our fair share of technical challenges. To give you a sense of scale: our database exceeds 7TB*, and our largest table recently crossed the 10 billion row mark. We interface with more than 30 different external APIs, and provide third parties an API of our own.

*: Our ops team noted that this actually isn’t that hard to achieve if you’re just indexing everything, but it still sounds impressive, right?

What does your future look like?

Personal growth is key to staying motivated. At Silverfin you don’t need to move to management in order to get promoted. We see the individual contributor track and the management track as two different growth paths which every engineer can follow and switch between. You can be promoted, including pay raises, as a contributor just like as a manager.

Everyone has a €1000 yearly budget to spend on conferences, courses, workshops or other training to improve their skills and level up. This also includes accommodation and travel costs. If the conference is on a workday you’ll get paid like any normal day.

What are we looking for?

• You have at least 3 years of professional experience in Javascript. 
• You have some experience using Javascript framework(s), understand the value of them, but also know when plain Javascript is enough.
• You also have experience using Rails and have used it as an api as well as for rendering HTML. 
• You’re up for mentoring coworkers and can give in-depth, productive feedback during code reviews. While you appreciate the small stuff, you recognize bikeshedding and can avoid its pitfalls.
• You code with reason and can justify the important decisions you made during development.
• You can communicate clearly in English, both written and verbally.
• You know and can apply best practices when relevant. That means the usual like version control, testing, and refactoring; but also higher level concepts such as separation of concerns.
• You're aware of the trade-offs involved in engineering, product design, as well as the bigger “business” picture.
• You’ve got opinions on code design and you can discuss them, but you’re professional enough to not let those opinions get in the way of a consensus if necessary.
• Your work hours have some overlap with EU business hours (we require your local timezone to be within CET +/- 3h)

Nice to have’s

These would be nice but are definitely not necessary. Don’t worry if none of the following applies to you.

• Experience as a remote worker in a fully remote team
• An eye for detail
• Experience in UI/UX design
• Experience in Fintech
• Basic understanding of accounting

What can we offer you?

• Actual, proper work-life balance
• Choose your own working hours and work 100% remotely
• Personal growth training and opportunities
• Join a distributed remote-first engineering team with 25 colleagues in 14 different countries
• A refreshing work environment with professional, friendly and welcoming colleagues
• A €1000 yearly budget for conferences, courses, workshops or other expenses that will improve your skills

Interested?

• Email us with any questions on engineering-recruitment@silverfin.com