Lead Engineer

Summary

Join the Mozilla Foundation as a Lead Engineer for the Common Voice project, a crucial initiative focused on building trustworthy AI. You will be part of a small, passionate team working on a globally impactful open-source project. This role requires extensive full-stack web development experience, leadership skills, and a deep understanding of data pipelines and scalable systems. You will lead technical decision-making, mentor junior engineers, and collaborate with diverse teams across the globe. The position offers competitive salary and benefits, including flexible remote work options and a supportive, inclusive work environment.

Requirements

• Passion for developing high quality, high impact products, platforms and experiences
• At least 7+ years of progressively responsible professional experience in full stack web development in a product team or product-centric company
• Experience leading technical decision making processes and managing and mentoring others
• An interest in voice technology and/or AI
• Fluency in HTML/CSS, Node.js, React, Python, MySQL and TypeScript
• Experience with data access and pipeline work, including designing and improving infrastructure for ingesting, storing, and transforming data
• Experience with highly scalable distributed systems hosted on cloud providers (e.g. Google Cloud Platform)
• Fluency in web application architecture, including data structures and microservices
• The ability to translate wireframes, style guides and design direction into polished, production ready visual experiences
• A user-centred approach, with a keen interest in collaborating with and serving a community’s needs. Ideally, have worked on contributor or community participation technologies in the past, or have had substantial personal experience contributing to an open source project
• Awareness of the need for accessibility in implementation and a willingness to collaborate with designers to deliver inclusive experiences
• Very strong communication skills -- you communicate your opinions clearly and listen to others carefully
• Interest working in, and communicating with, multidisciplinary teams with different backgrounds and skillsets - you must have a deep respect for the different skills that people bring
• A willingness to learn and keep growing, both professionally and personally

Responsibilities

• Work directly with the Product Director to shape and inform all aspects of the product roadmap
• Translate strategic product requirements into engineering requirements in close collaboration with the other engineers - you will take the lead on deciding architectural direction and clearly weigh the trade offs between different paths
• Partner with the Product Manager and Designer to create technical content for PRDs, decide on appropriate ticket articulation, sizing and support allocating tickets between team members
• Line-manage 2 software engineers, helping them to grow and thrive in their roles. You will use both day-to-day code reviews and regular pairing, and more structured rhythms like progression reviews, to support them
• Be hands-on with the codebase - this is a small team, and you should still expect to help deliver features using a mixture of languages, frameworks and tooling, including HTML, CSS, React, Typescript, Node.js, Docker, Kubernetes, MySQL, Python and more that support the Common Voice platform and dataset
• Have primary responsibility for ensuring the security, logging, performance and accessibility of the platform - this means you will support security incident handling (including, on very rare occasions, responding to cyber-emergencies outside of working hours)
• Be excited to lead technical discovery processes and enshrine engineering best practice, improving tooling, and considering how to use AI to augment workflows
• Partner with the community management team to understand the wide and diverse community of software engineers, language activists and data scientists globally who use and contribute to Common Voice, and respond to that community’s needs, for example by reviewing their PRs
• Collaborate with designers to build and deploy prototypes and experiments that test experience concepts. You will help plan for iterations inclusive of accessibility and responsive design standard methodologies
• Communicate clearly, thoughtfully and regularly - this is a remote, distributed team with a strong culture of warmth, trust and openness
• Be able to roll with ambiguity and change - we are making several transitions within the platform, and within the organisation. This means it is an exciting time to join!

Preferred Qualifications

• Infrastructure experience - eg with Kubernetes - a strong plus
• Willingness to partly overlap with European and African time zones would be helpful
• Give talks and represent the Common Voice project publicly, including at high profile events, or write technical blog posts for our developer community
• Mentor more junior members of the team, as well as others around Mozilla (e.g through skills-sharing and/or pairing)

Benefits

• Private Medical Insurance
• Extended Sick Leave
• Global Employee Assistance Program (EAP)
• Retirement Plan contributions
• Paid Time Off: 20 days annual leave + sick days and your birthday
• Company Holidays + Shutdown
• Wellness budget
• Professional Development budget
• Top up program for Pregnancy and Parental leaves
• You will be able to work flexibly and remotely - we welcome applications from those who are working alongside other commitments, for example responsibilities of care-giving, or creative projects