Lead Software Engineer

Puck is seeking a Lead Software Engineer as the first in-house engineering hire who will work with management to scale the engineering team as the company matures. Individual will create digital experiences and scalable technology that delivers on Puck's mission to report the inside story at the nexus of Hollywood, Silicon Valley, Wall Street and Washington. This player/coach role will be very hands-on, with dual-focus on producing in the codebase and developing engineering processes.

Since launching in September 2021 Puck has quickly grown a loyal subscriber base and a robust ad-revenue business. The product is at an exciting inflection point as we continue to introduce new talent and coverage areas, develop more features and tools to enable personalized and relevant experiences for readers, and grow new revenue streams.

The role will report to the Chief Strategy Officer (co-founder), and work collaboratively with Product, Growth, Data, Design, Ops, and Editorial at Puck to set and deliver on a robust, multi-year strategy. The role will be responsible for bringing Puck's product vision to life across all existing and future surfaces and building on a culture that is motivated, diverse, equitable, supportive, and inclusive.

Requirements & Responsibilities

• Lead feature and optimization development from technical design through deployment and operational maintenance in Production
• Collaborate, prototype, and lead customer acquisition / conversion funnel experiments and scale MVP ideas that work (leveraging both client-side and server-side tests)
• Implement testing strategies and frameworks from the ground up (end-to-end, unit, behavioral, and acceptance testing, linting, and more)
• Bring engineering leadership to project planning, implementation, delivery. Generate clean, well-commented code and technical documentation of the platform architecture as well as new and existing features
• Full-stack background with expertise in multiple areas of the stack and comfort programming from scratch when necessary
• Product and UX minded, ability to work seamlessly across Product, Growth, Data, Design, Ops, and Editorial

Basic Qualifications

• Advanced PHP expertise with 5+ years of object-oriented PHP7 & 8 development and tooling
• 3+ years of experience with one or more frontend frameworks (React, Next, Angular, or similar)
• 3+ years of experience with one or more backend frameworks (Node, Laravel, Ruby, or similar)
• Strong familiarity with integrating 3rd party APIs and understanding SDKs for payment, registration, audio/video, email broadcast, and experimentation platforms without robust guidance
• Familiarity with systems architecture
• Extreme curiosity and motivation to learn new product areas and processes
• Always looks for the out-of-the-box solution first, but able to create clean, simple custom solutions when needed
• Operate with speed and efficiency, highly communicative, and able to portray highly technical details in layman's terms

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience working in journalism, publication, media, news, or similar
• Experience with PHP Wordpress-specific FE & BE development
• Experience scaling media- or subscription-specific platforms, websites or products with a history of results delivery against core business objectives and metrics
• Experience with frontend work involving imagery, videos, animations, TTS, UI responses, and more
• Experience implementing and improving CI/CD pipelines and tools, setting up site monitoring and mature DevOps processes without guidance or direction
• Experience collaborating with Git, Slack, Google Suite, Zoom, Trello, Jira, Miro and Figma

$160,000 - $220,000 a year

Range shown is for base salary. Total compensation is inclusive of base salary and an equity allotment commensurate with experience.

At Puck, we believe that journalists are society's original influencers. Yet the digital media economy of the last decade created an insurmountable rift between journalists and their followings. Puck exists to change that; we want to return power to journalists by creating a media platform owned and operated by the journalists themselves. Puck is a news brand dedicated to the inside story, hyper focused on the four power corners of American culture: Wall Street, Silicon Valley, Washington, and Hollywood. We are focused on the "last mile" of news - what the insiders are really saying.

Puck was founded by four media industry veterans and a handful of entrepreneurial journalists. We launched in September 2021 and have been featured in The New York Times, Axios, Bloomberg, and other leading publications. We raised a Series B with TPG Growth and 40 North Media and are headquartered in Manhattan. Last but not least, we offer competitive salaries and equity (commensurate with experience) as well as unlimited PTO plus 401k, pre-tax commuter cards, health, dental, and vision insurance.