Platform Developer at Zola Electric

The Position
As a core member of the Digital Platforms department, you’ll help define and create new product features and experiences for our rapidly growing customer base and workforce. Our team is responsible for Zola Electric’s core platform, our “operating system for the business”.

The Zola platform provides much of the magic, leading our distributed workforce, enabling customer payments and service and handles all distribution and delivery of our solar systems and appliances. We are creating opportunities for thousands of local workers to participate in a high tech start-up, and our platform enables us to do this with utmost efficiency, scale, and reliability.

Zola Electric is creating opportunities for thousands of local workers to participate in a high tech startup, and our platform enables us to do this with utmost efficiency, scale, and reliability. As a full-stack application developer, you will be integral to the ongoing design and implementation of our platform, a collection of Ruby applications that underlie our Web, mobile, tablet and SMS user interfaces. You’ll not only build the features that help us achieve our mission but ensure that we deploy to the cloud and monitor success in a Docker-based continuous deployment cycle.

The platform also generates mountains of real-time data that we use to run the business and drive positive behavior change with customers and staff. You will work closely with our Data practice to incorporate its data into the business logic and user interfaces. You’ll be working to solve interesting technical and human problems across our entire platform, including:

• Continuing to migrate from REST APIs towards expanding our platform’s next generation GraphQL APIs, adding functionality to our growing internal and partner APIs
• Building workflow-based UIs with React for the independent, web-based static front-end client
• Enabling robust 3rd party integrations helping us get the most out of integrated solutions and offloading anything not core to the business
• Maintaining and incrementally improving a large Application with 5 years of history, both full of powerful historical insights and not entirely understood corners
• Mentoring and collaborating effectively in a distributed team, using a pragmatic, agile process

Requirements

• B.Sc / M.Sc in Computer Science, IT Systems or related field is preferred, yet is not required,
• Experience in field, internships, or alternative career paths are accepted
• 2-years experience with any front end framework (React, Angular, Jquery, etc)
• 2-years experience with any back end web framework (Node.js, Rails, Php, Python)
• 1-year experience with Ruby on Rails
• Comfortable experience with version control (git, github, etc)
• A example project that can be shared considered a bonus, if available
• Always be Learning: You are committed to self-improvement, which means you’ve sought and found mentors to learn from.  You’re also a natural at mentoring, teaching, and reviewing others’ work, help other engineers make sound architectural decisions, improve their code quality, and get out of their comfort zone. Because you know there’s always more to learn, you don’t get hung up on knowing everything before taking action. As you know so well, taking action is often the only way to discover if something works.
• Technical journey: You have worked with and deployed several frameworks and languages. You have favorites frameworks, languages, and methods but enjoy learning and digging into new things. You enjoy working on both smaller and newer applications and large applications with years of operational experience under the hood.
• User-centered: As much as you love technical challenges for their own sake, you’re inspired by making things that work for real people. You ask tough questions about how requested features solve user problems, and have a great track record of collaborating with designers and product managers on solutions.
• Effortless Communicator: You love to work as part of a distributed team. You realize that the key to successful remote work is trust, which comes from regular communication through tools like Slack, and respect for the team’s agile process (e.g., Jira stories and GitHub pull requests). You also know the value of face-to-face interaction, even if only through web conferencing tools, and have enjoyed being a great teammate in virtualized contexts.
• Pragmatic: In a discussion of how to build a feature you will reliably bring people back to the question of what are we trying to achieve, and how will we know when we’re successful? You love new technologies, but will only recommend them if they are the most effective way of solving the problem at hand, and are an expert in playing a devil’s advocate of your own ideas. You are drawn to measure the results of changes to user experiences, and look for opportunities to remove features if they are not being used (or used well).
• Lateral thinker: In software so many of the leaps forward on the non-obvious ones, hence you have a well-honed sense for knowing when to apply oblique methods to a challenging problem that evades straightforward approaches. This may mean being able to connect the dots across different domains (anthropology, economics, psychology, politics), but it always means being willing to suspend judgment through the process of divergence and convergence.
• Curious: Unsatisfied with accepted wisdom, you’ll ask why multiple times when wrapping your head around a new concept or proposal. You’re also fascinated with the kinds of problems your peers in the industry are solving, and the novel approaches they’re taking. This leads you to be involved in local user meetings, online communities, and conferences.