We are hiring a technology lead to join our team. This role is for our distributed team, who normally operates within the +8 UTC (Cebu) to +10 UTC (Sydney) time zones.

As a technology lead, you will help us build our telecommunications products which are being used by customers globally. We want to empower small and medium businesses to offer telecommunications products in a way that they can compete with big companies. If you are interested in working on this mission, please join us.

This role is a specialized role for a senior staff software engineer in one of our software teams, which we designed to be tight-knit and cross-functional, responsible for the full cycle of software development in order to deliver complete features to our users. These teams revolve around several domains and services which they develop and maintain.

In addition to being an individual contributor in a team, you are expected to perform technical leadership responsibilities 

Technical Leadership means being responsible for:

• Overall health and operational performance quality of the services
  • Escalation for production and customer support
  • Lead investigation of critical issues and disaster recovery
  • Assess risks in production and design mitigations
  • Manage Tools, Services, Platforms. This includes service cost and license fees.
  • Design and manage maintenance initiatives.
• Planning, design, implementation, and delivery of software
  • Develop and propagate technical practices and patterns
  • Manage select technical work group initiatives
  • Lead documentation efforts of technical items and decisions
  • Lead architecture and infrastructure designs and manage its continuous evolution with the teams
  • Manage tech exploration, and adoption
  • Assess risks in delivery, designs, and how we can mitigate
• Cross team/domain alignment on technical decisions
  • Communicates and consult with other leaders and engineers on relevant technical topics
  • Provide expert consulting on domains/technology/patterns for other leaders and engineers
• Overall improving and maintaining technical capability in the organization
  • Participate in enabling teams to acquire and share knowledge and abilities
  • Participate in qualifying job applicants
  • Participate in providing feedback and evaluating staff performance
• Aligning business and technology
  • Provide technical consulting for stakeholders, product managers
  • Participate in business strategy development 
  • Manage relationship with external suppliers and partners

These responsibilities are by no means expected to be done as a solo work. You will be working with developers, product leads, and managers to achieve this.

In addition, a senior staff software engineer will have the following functions:

• Provide technical mentorship with peers. (in and outside the team you operate in)
• Contributes to the development of policies, standards and guidelines for software development
• Participates in the system level design process. (spans multiple contexts)
• Translates business context into technical requirements
• Provides reliable guidance on domains they operate in.
• Analyzes patterns and trends to anticipate problems in production systems and services.
• Advise on security, licensing, performance and other technical aspects of production systems.
• Identifies operational problems and contributes to resolutions.
• Contributes to planning on infrastructure sizing and design.
• Maintenance of production services, pipelines, and its infrastructure.
• Participate in qualifying applicants to our Software Engineering roles

In addition, a senior staff software engineer will have the following functions:

• Provide technical mentorship with peers. (in and outside the team you operate in)
• Contributes to the development of policies, standards and guidelines for software development
• Participates in the system level design process. (spans multiple contexts)
• Translates business context into technical requirements
• Provides reliable guidance on domains they operate in.
• Analyzes patterns and trends to anticipate problems in production systems and services.
• Advise on security, licensing, performance and other technical aspects of production systems.
• Identifies operational problems and contributes to resolutions.
• Contributes to planning on infrastructure sizing and design.
• Maintenance of production services, pipelines, and its infrastructure.
• Participate in qualifying applicants to our Software Engineering roles

As part of our distributed team, the following are expected:

• Establish a working space and infrastructure, to effectively participate in a distributed environment
• Schedule work on a daily basis, with a minimum of 4 hours overlap with the rest of the team
• Use a stable, high quality Internet access for video conferencing, pair programming, etc.

Who you are

We are looking for someone with the following qualification:

• With at least the equivalent of 10 years work experience, in any programming language, in building software systems
• With experience in a technical leadership role, such as setting technical strategy and helping teams resolve complex technical issues
• Strong background in Java development for web services
• Experience in frameworks such as Spring Boot and frontend development using Javascript frameworks like Angular is critical.
• Strong knowledge and practical experience in best practices for object-oriented programming (SOLID principles, etc.) and architectural, design, and code patterns
• Strong knowledge and experience in scalable database design, data modeling, and test-driven development
• Strong background and experience in using cloud services and APIs with Amazon Web Services (AWS)
• Administration and shell usage of Linux-based systems (CentOS, Ubuntu)
• Understanding of common Internet protocols (HTTP, DNS, etc.) and usage of networking software such as SSH and curl is an advantage.
• Experience in the telecommunications software domain is an advantage
• With strong communication skills, openness to new ideas, resourceful, and eager to continuously learn

As part of a distributed team, the following qualifications are required:

• Self-discipline and good work ethics
• Good verbal and written communication
• Good time management and ability to minimize distractions

What we offer

• An environment of a sports team that is there to coach each other while being performant. 
• A software engineering culture that strives to build high quality software.
• An organization of autonomous teams, exploring and trying out solutions in a safe environment.
• A place for you to learn, practice, develop yourself, and contribute to something meaningful.
• A front seat at a fast growing, global company with a lot of opportunities in software and technology with exposure in telecommunications and web.
• Flexibility and a wide array of health and well-being incentives to keep you balanced.
• An opportunity to work with some of the best and smartest people around.

About our software team

At Synacy, we develop our own products. Our founders, product teams, engineering teams, and customer support teams are all part of the same company, co-located in our offices (mainly in Cebu and Manila) and work closely together to develop products that delight our customers.

Our software team is composed of 3 to 5 cross-functional members and is designed to be complete and responsible for delivering complete features to users. We expect our engineers to be not just writing code, but to participate in the entire process from investigating problems, designing solutions, and implementing them into features our users will love. In addition, we have a leadership team that is composed of team leads, product managers, and engineering managers, that work together in leading the entire software group.

We use a goal-oriented product roadmap to keep all our teams aligned, which is updated in a weekly cycle by the leadership team. Further, we maintain a corresponding release plan based on a monthly release cycle, where we break down features into sizeable chunks that our teams can work with as little inter-team dependency as possible.

Our teams apply an agile process of weekly planning, retrospectives, daily check-in, pair programming, and use Trello to visualize our progress. All our code is version controlled in Github and all code changes go through a peer-review process.

We have a continuous delivery pipeline, using CircleCI and CloudFormation, and perform deployment using automated tools in our AWS production site. We built most of our automation tools and we expect all our engineers to participate in maintaining our development tools, delivery pipelines, and production sites.

Our teams are encouraged to spend time developing their knowledge and skills so they stay relevant in their field. We have self-initiated learning sessions and allocate time in weekly sprints for learning activities.
Learn more about our engineering culture here.

About our distributed team

We have distributed teams as part of our software group, where all members are working remotely. Though it is an option for members to work in one of our offices in Cebu or Manila, it is expected for every member of the team to effectively participate in a distributed or remote-first environment.

Teams work full-time in a remote working environment where members are not expected nor required to be in the same physical space. However, there are a few scheduled in-person get-togethers to strengthen the team’s relationship. Work schedule is flexible with an overlap of 4 hours a day working together. Communication and documentation are primarily done using online channels.

Our leadership team works in a distributed environment and operates primarily using online channels. Though a few of our feature teams are on-site in our offices, we have made adjustments so both remote and feature teams can work together.

Every member of the team is responsible for creating the working conditions to effectively participate in a distributed environment. Similar to how our company is obliged to create good working conditions in our office space, every member is obliged to create a similar space wherever the member chooses to work.

The company will provide the primary equipment for work that’s at least equivalent to what is provided to the team working on-site, either at full cost or subsidized in accordance to the general policy in our company.

We do not offer training for anyone qualified to be distributed. We expect members to prepare and be ready to be part of a distributed team.

About the company

Synacy is a global company developing software products in the Philippines using international best practices and delivering them to our customers around the world. We aim to help businesses be competitive in a consolidating telecommunications and technology market and give them access to opportunities that until now only large companies can realise.

We believe the best results for end users and customers come from having a number of various companies providing the best to service them. We want to enable them to thrive by providing the infrastructure and tools for them to sell new telecom products and enhance the value they deliver to their customers.

Though we are based in the Philippines, our founders are originally from Australia and we have a diverse and multinational leadership team, bringing in perspectives from different backgrounds and cultures. We continuously learn from each other to become better at what we do.

Our company offers our products under a few brands. At UTBox, Monopond, and BurstFax, we offer fax and SMS messaging products available globally for retail and wholesale use. We also founded an internet service provider to accelerate the internet in the Philippines called RISE. At RISE, we offer competitive fiber-based internet access to businesses located in major cities in the country.

It is our intent to form a globally competitive organization. We believe talented and remarkable people are found anywhere in the world. At the moment, we have most of our teams co-located in our offices in the Philippines. However, we don’t limit our reach here and are forming a remote-first culture within our organization so we can offer the opportunity to current and new members to work wherever they are productive.

A few of our strategies:

• Software and automation is at our core. We believe in efficient, resilient, and scalable approach. Work smarter not harder, so that when you work hard you are working smart.
• To our customers, we want to offer a complete service in an integrated package.
• We have taken the challenge of integrating with many telecommunication providers in the world and aggregated our customer traffic to offer a consistent quality at the best possible price.

Hiring Process

We understand that applying for a new job or even looking for new opportunities can be a tedious and stressful process. We aim to give our applicants a good experience by being timely, efficient, and direct. We’d like for you to select us and we look forward to working together.

Even if you are not looking for work now, we encourage you to apply since you may go through our qualification process and assess our offer without any commitment to accept immediately. If you like what you are getting then you can plan with us on when you will eventually join.

PRIVACY STATEMENT

Synacy/RISE is committed to protecting your personal information. Your information will be collected, used and may be shared by Synacy/RISE with third party service providers to serve lawful purposes, for Synacy/RISE recruitment process, including processing of data by third party when required. Your information shall be held only as long as necessary to achieve the purpose for which it is collected. The use and transfer of your information will be strictly in accordance with the applicable data privacy law and in line with our privacy policy available at Synacy/RISE Privacy Policy. Further, by clicking Apply, you agree and acknowledge that you have read Synacy/RISE’s privacy policy and fully understand your rights to access, correct or withdraw your information anytime.