Silverfin: Team Lead Product

We start with the cliff notes about the position. If this appeals to you, continue reading for a longer text version about us and working at Silverfin further down.

At Silverfin, we're an equal opportunity employer and value diversity at our company. We do not discriminate based on race, religion, colour, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, or disability status.

Although we know we’re not perfect yet, we are working hard on it and are always open to your feedback.

According to our vision to build a diverse, equitable, and inclusive organisation, our policy is to only start the interviewing process once underrepresented groups are sufficiently present in the list of candidates applying for the position. For this reason, it’s possible interviews will get slightly delayed until we’ve reached that goal.

We're committed to elevating talent by creating an environment where we can all thrive together. So if you think you have what it takes, but don't necessarily check every single box, please consider applying. We'd love to hear how you might contribute to our mission and our team.

• Join a distributed remote-first engineering team with 40 colleagues in 14 different countries
• A refreshing work environment with professional, friendly, and welcoming peers
• Actual, proper work-life balance
• A salary range of €112.000 - €169.000 a year
• Flexible working hours and 100% remote work
• Participation in our Leadership Development Program and opportunities for personal growth and mentoring
• A €1200 yearly budget for conferences, courses, workshops, or other expenses that will improve your skills
• Two engineering retreats per year, somewhere in Europe
• Monthly Company-wide Wellbeing Days off (Reviewed Annually)

• You have at least 2 years of leadership experience
• You’re up for managing and mentoring an engineering team
• You have recent experience as a Senior Software Engineer
• You know or are interested in learning Ruby on Rails
• You're interested in getting to know our customers to find the best solution for a given challenge.
• You're aware of the trade-offs involved in proper engineering and can make balanced business decisions, keeping in mind all the stakeholders of the project.
• You can communicate clearly in English, both verbally and in writing.

Those were the cliff notes. In the next sections, we're going to dive a little bit deeper into explaining who we are and the teams that make up Silverfin Engineering.

As an engineering team lead, you're going to manage, inspire, and mentor a team of engineers to foster a culture of innovation, collaboration, and continuous improvement. You will furthermore act as the cohesive force between your team, the Engineering department, and the company as a whole. Operating in a "player-coach" model, you balance hands-on contributions with team management.

• Live the Silverfin values and be a role model for the individual contributors
• Collaborate with and support your fellow team leads (we're big believers in a well-aligned Team Number 1)
• Make sure your team is aligned with the other engineering teams and the rest of the organisation, focusing on the highest business priorities
• Lead and mentor the team while closely coordinating with the product manager
• Embrace the "player-coach" model, with a significant portion of your time dedicated to direct technical contributions
• Help with discovery and delivery of the best way to solve a customer or business problem
• Help with maintenance and support of existing functionality

At Silverfin, we apply the promise of software to the age-old industry of accounting. With our SaaS, we’re automating a large chunk of the busywork that accountants are currently handling manually and are building new tools so they can provide better services to their customers. We aim to optimise 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 week, more than 15.000 financial service professionals use Silverfin to help and advise more than 400.000 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.

Since November 2023, we are proudly part of Visma - the European leader in mission-critical cloud software, enjoying the power of the Visma brand and resources whilst retaining business autonomy and go-to-market freedom.

What does working at Silverfin look like?

Our product teams are cross-functional teams, with engineering, product design, and product management represented. They work very close to the users, trying to understand their problems and then discovering and implementing solutions that add the most value. We believe in very close collaboration between the three perspectives as early in the process as possible. The product teams are supported by other teams that provide core services, maintain complicated subsystems, or possess specialised expertise.

We're proud of our in-house AI team, which is focused on the application of the newest developments in machine learning to address our users' most important challenges. We’re pretty far on that journey already, since we have multiple AI-powered features that are solving actual client problems and are commercially successful.

Our CloudOps team ensures things run smoothly and will happily work with you when 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”.

We run an up-to-date Rails monolith on the backend, with 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 Google Meet as our remote conferencing tool of choice.

No code gets deployed without a 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.

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: in our biggest stack, our database exceeds 17TB*, and our largest table has crossed the 10 billion row mark a long while back. We run stacks on multiple continents, and we interface with more than 30 different external APIs and provide third parties with an API of our own.

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

What makes the engineering team at Silverfin special?

We’re a remote-first engineering team of 40 people distributed in 14 different countries over two continents. 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, 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 organised 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 favour 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 Quip, our central wiki, so there’s a written, persisted record. We’re mindful of maintaining long chunks of focused 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 #engineering 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 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 your future look like?

Personal growth is key to staying motivated. As a manager in Silverfin you will participate in our initial Leadership Development Program and regular Leadership Days. Of course, your manager is there for mentoring and coaching you in your role as well. In addition to that, everybody gets a €1200 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.

Requirements

• You have at least 2 years of experience leading a team
• You have recent experience as a Senior Software Engineer
• You know or are interested in learning Ruby on Rails
• Your work hours have some overlap with EU business hours (we require your local timezone to be within CET +/- 3h)
• You can communicate clearly in English, both in writing and verbally

• These would be nice but are definitely not necessary. Don’t worry if none of the following applies to you.
• Experience with Ruby on Rails
• Experience as a remote worker in a fully remote team
• Experience working with large datasets and the problems they bring
• Experience in API design is a strong plus