Backend Team Lead

Zagreb

WHO WE ARE LOOKING FOR

An experienced leader to manage a team of backend engineers, support their growth, and streamline project delivery.

We’re a team of 13 Rails Engineers. Our primary technology is Ruby on Rails, and our database of choice is PostgreSQL.

We mostly build APIs, admin dashboards, and integrations with third-party services – without us, clients aren’t served, and emails aren’t sent. Since we are big believers in keeping API documentation up-to-date with the actual implementation, we generate ours from tests.

To support team-wide knowledge-sharing, we hold weekly presentations and discussions. The teams we most often collaborate with are JavaScript, Mobile, and DevOps.

The only things we like more than high-quality software and automating boring tasks are BBQs by the Mrežnica River and team-building activities that involve jacuzzis.

The ideal candidate is someone with proven leadership skills who can support the team’s well-being and growth, while improving the quality of delivery. This is a non-coding role, so experience with any backend technology will do — we don’t expect you to be a Rails expert. If that sounds like you, we’d love to meet you.

Qualifications & Experience

at least 2 years of team management experience
at least 4 years of experience with backend technologies (Ruby on Rails, Java, .NET, etc.)
background in software development or computer science with deep knowledge of software development patterns
experience with leading projects for both local and international clients
strong interpersonal and communication skills with the ability to inspire and lead a team
excellent time management, organizational, and multitasking skills
proactiveness and high level of responsibility
willingness to stay up to date with the latest trends and best practices in software development
excellent knowledge of written and spoken English and Croatian

Bonus points:

experience with Ruby on Rails
experience working in a digital agency
mentoring and coaching experience
experience in hiring

Your responsibilities

Collaborating with the Head of Rails & Java and Lead Rails Engineers, you will lead our Rails team, support team members’ growth, and ensure high-quality project delivery.

Team management

taking care of your team members’ well-being
developing a career progression framework and managing career advancement expectations
creating short-term, mid-term, and long-term plans for the team’s growth and development and defining OKRs
proactively coordinating team members’ workload
conducting performance reviews
participating in the hiring process if needed, from planning to interviews

Project sponsorship

acting as a domain coordinator or sponsor on one or more projects, with or without hands-on work
ensuring high-quality project delivey and client satisfaction
arranging regular follow-ups on the projects your team members are working on

Internal processes

solving organizational and management matters, primarily optimizing talent utilization with the Planning team
collaborating with other Team Directors, HoDs, Lead Engineers, HR, Planning, Management, and Business Development to enhance the company’s internal processes, culture, and growth
continually improving your skills, encouraging others to grow and sharing knowledge with team members

The selection process

01 First interview

You talk to the HR person leading you through the selection process. You get acquainted with Infinum, your potential future team and position, while we also get to know you.

02 Online testing and Reference check

You complete a series of psychological tests, which typically include personality assessments, logical reasoning tests, and tests of performance and concentration. In the meantime, we’ll conduct a reference check with the contacts you’ve provided.

03 Onsite assessment

An extensive phase where you get the opportunity to get familiar with our offices and the team, as well as the position itself. It also gives us a deeper insight into your knowledge and experience, covering both technical and people-management aspects.

04 Offer

All going well, in this stage we send you the offer, which includes all the information from salary details, vacation days, and educational budget, to other perks and benefits of working at Infinum.

03 Next thing you know

You’ll balance project deadlines and team morale like a pro.

Tools
we use

GitHub

All of our work is on GitHub. Everything goes through pull requests and code reviews with your future team members.

GitHub Actions

We use GitHub Actions to automate our CI/CD pipeline, ensuring that our code gets from development to production with minimal fuss.

New Relic

New Relic is our go-to solution for monitoring the performance of our apps so we can make sure there are no bottlenecks that stop everything from running smoothly.

Docker

On some projects we add Docker to our toolkit to bundle up our apps and dependencies, making deployment a breeze.

AWS

Our go to cloud-computing platform which we use for hosting our apps, working with databases, storing files and other features.

Sidekiq

Sidekiq is our behind-the-scenes hero, handling all those background tasks and making sure our apps stay lightning-fast.

JSON:API

The https://jsonapi.org/ standard is our preferred solution for server-client data exchange. We’ve built multiple gems that simplify data extraction, serialization, etc.

Bugsnag

We rely on bugsnag for capturing errors on our applications. When a problem occurs in our code, Bugsnag automatically creates an event and notifies the whole development team.

Rubocop

A Ruby static code analyzer and formatter, created by the community to make clean code, by following the best practices used by Ruby developers.

RSpec

Tests are an important part of our projects, and we use the RSpec testing framework for Ruby and as well for Rails. It is the most frequently used testing library for Ruby in production applications.

Dox

Our in-house developed Rails gem for automatically generating API documentation from Rspec tests.

Revisor

We’ve built an application that observes the health of every active project and notifies us about new CVEs. We frequently update our dependencies and like to keep our apps and infrastructure up-to-date.

Productive

Most of our projects are managed using Productive, in-house software which substitutes Jira, Asana, Trello and other issue tracking products.

Slack

Whether remote or in the office, Slack enables us to exchange information, discuss code, make decisions quickly and stay on top of things.

Handbook

Through the years we’ve built a vast repository of knowledge related to ruby, rails and backend in general. It serves as our guide and shows our way of working.

What do we offer?

Feedback and feedforward

Honest communication fuels growth. In our 1 on 1 sessions, 360 reviews, and career progression meetings, we discuss what is great and what could be improved.

Additional equipment budget

A little extra to supplement your standard work equipment. Pick a latest-model mobile phone, tablet, e-book reader, or a pair of earphones you’ve been dreaming about. Mix & match, why not.