Job Description
Technical Lead – Casting Tools
at Backstage
Remote USA
About Backstage
Backstage matches creative projects with the best talent. We help staff over 50,000 creative projects a year in film, television, commercials, branded content, theater, experiential marketing and more. At our core is a strong belief in breaking down barriers and providing direct access to the best talent in the creative industry. We’re a team of customer centric, analytical and creative problem solvers with a passion for helping our customers make amazing projects together.
Backstage Holdings’ mission is to empower creative talent and streamline the content creation process for projects in film, television, commercials/branded content, social media, theater, music video, video games, and more. At our core is a strong belief in breaking down barriers and providing direct access to the best talent in the creative industry. We’re a team of customer centric, analytical and creative problem solvers with a passion for helping our customers make amazing projects together. Our mission: empower creative talent and streamline the content creation process for projects in film, television, commercials/branded content, social media, theater, music video, video games, and more. Backstage provides solutions that manage the entire project lifecycle, including talent discovery and staffing, production, post production, and distribution. Our brands include Backstage, Coverfly, FilmFreeway, Final Draft, ShareGrid, Sonicbids, and Voice123. Visit our website for more information.
Backstage Holdings is part of Cast & Crew LLC, a family of individually innovative companies modernizing the ways in which content is created.
The Role:
We’re looking for a Tech Lead – Casting Tools at Backstage to lead a team of software engineers and be responsible for the delivery of high-quality software products. Our backend web team consists of eight engineers, and includes mid and senior level engineers, tech leads, and an engineering manager. This team is a part of Backstage’s larger product and engineering department, which numbers approximately thirty high-performance engineers, designers, product managers, analysts, and quality assurance resources. We value curiosity, trust, and impact, and we foster a culture of constant learning and improvement where teammates work together to accomplish user-focused initiatives. Our process is a modified Kanban process with the goal of delivering incremental value to the customer. Products are workshopped and then broken into milestones, with estimates driven by engineers, not managers. We uphold autonomy and trust our engineers to pick the best tools suited for their tasks, while working collaboratively towards mutual goals. In line with our goal to continue delivering value to the customer, we release multiple times a day, every day, and adhere to a robust QA and code review process before any code is released.
As our Tech Lead – Casting Tools, you will work closely with cross-functional teams, including product management, design, and QA, to ensure that projects are delivered on time and meet business and customer requirements. In this role, you will also be responsible for building and maintaining a positive and collaborative team culture, as well as mentoring and developing team members to help them reach their full potential.
What You’ll Do:
- Work closely with cross-functional teams to ensure that projects are delivered on time and meet business and customer requirements
- Act as a technical leader, providing guidance and direction to team members
- Mentor and develop team members to help them reach their full potential
- Collaborate with engineering leadership to drive technical and process improvements across the organization
- Review code for acceptance criteria, robustness, style, and maintainability
- Plan how and when to upgrade our infrastructure and toolset, and address technical debt in collaboration with other senior members of the engineering team
- Implement / maintain best practices to ensure platform uptime, stability, and responsiveness
- Actively contribute to the codebase, setting a high standard for code quality, scalability, and maintainability
What we’re looking for from you:
- Proven experience building a major product or feature from scratch at scale for a large public-facing web application
- Experience mentoring or leading an engineering team
- Advanced proficiency with Python and Django
- Solid database skills in a relational database (i.e., PostgresSQL, MySQL, etc.)
- Experience with Elasticsearch a plus
- Experience in developing RESTful APIs
- Strong unit test and debugging skills
- Experience incrementally rolling out new features, components or refactors without blocking the rest of the team, and iterating upon and maintaining live products
- Strong project management skills; able to organize, adhere to process, and execute projects across disciplines and by deadline
- Excellent communication skills; you can articulate clearly, thoroughly, and concisely to technical and non-technical audiences
- Comfortability with the entire development life cycle (inception to release) in an Agile environment
- Collaborative, engaged, and adaptable; you are comfortable joining a team with a large, mature codebase with established engineering processes
- Flexible and proactive, you’re able to shift gears quickly in a fast-paced environment
- Familiarity with Javascript/React a plus
