The Hard Things...

(Which Are Also The Best Things).

Breadth

Qwilr is a large, complex and multi-layered app used by tens of thousands of people conducting millions and millions dollars worth of business.

Because we are still a small team, that means you might work on (take a breath): feature building, analytics and data crunching, build systems, Docker and container questions, infrastructure, load and scale questions, caching & CDN questions, headless browsers, low level APIs for our WYSIWYG editor and a lot more (okay, breathe out).

We aren’t a group of specialist engineers who own separate domains, we are generalists who work together to solve problems. To thrive in this environment you need to fundamentally love learning new things, improving where you might have gaps or weaknesses and embrace That Kindergarten Feeling of starting from a low knowledge baseline and figuring things out.

We’re a Startup (no, really, we actually are).

At Qwilr we’re building something that has no precedent, dealing with tricky technical domains (WYSIWYG ain't easy!), chasing exponential growth and grappling with scarce resources. This is the genuine startup engineering experience. Sometimes that means making mistakes and that’s OK. In our experience, you'll need humility, independence and a good dose of fortitude. But if you’re the right kind of mind, it’s also the most fun you’ll ever have.

We Have A High Bar Of Excellence.

Our first principle as a company is “Undeniable Bestness”. We believe in winning our race by being the best, not through hacks, bandaids and shortcuts. This means we have a high bar of excellence at the company. For code, product and for people. We care about how expressive that function name is, whether we have boiled things down into the crispest abstractions and whether the pieces of a system fit together, as naturally as Lego. We go back to the drawing board when things aren't right, because we care deeply about the quality of what we produce.

High Bar Of Excellence Meets Velocity

There’s an episode of the Simpsons where Homer says: “that’s future me’s problem”. It's funny in the context of the Simpsons, but less funny in the context of a complex and long-lived codebase. Qwilr engineers have the difficult task of managing tradeoffs between Current Us and Future Us. Respecting and thinking about this tradeoff is part of Qwilr’s second principle as a company: “Velocity With Valour”. And it’s no easy thing to do. But building this muscle and making it part of our daily conversation is what makes us a formidable product team.

Engineering Is Connected

We are a product driven company. That means that engineering operates very closely with design and product decisions are made in a wide context of concerns around our users and the business. This can be a challenging way to engineer because it means coding doesn’t happen in isolation, but its an incredibly valuable mindset and skill set for engineers to have.