Engineering Manager

Engineering plays a very central part in the business.

As a company with a world-class API solution for all things tax, we prioritise quality over quantity in our development. We care about creating scalable, easy-to-operate, easy-to-expand, and easy-to-maintain software that our customers and daily users can rely on.

Some pointers about our engineering culture:

• Engineers are given customer problems to solve rather than features to build.

• We understand the customer's needs before considering implementation details.

• Engineers are owners of their past, present, and future, encompassing architecture, tools, coding, testing, deployment, operations, and scaling.

• We work in lean, small teams. We co-own the product roadmap with product managers.

• We choose collaboration, compassion, and trust over individualism and politics.

• We prefer innovation through constant iteration and trust over competition and perfect solutions.

• We support one another, are naturally kind, and provide constructive feedback to continually improve as professionals.

• We boil down complex problems and consistently seek the most straightforward solutions.

• We take quality and security seriously and factor it into everything we do.

• We are comfortable with change in terms of priorities, goals and deadlines. We see this more as an opportunity than a hurdle.

• We are never satisfied with the status quo and push for improvements.

• We seek those looking to make a severe impact and are excited about working in a high-growth startup.

• We ship fast, continuously, and iteratively multiple times per day, learning with each step.

• We embrace mistakes as a conduit for learning. We don’t blame and consider every failure an opportunity to improve.

• We measure everything, use the data to make decisions, and influence the direction.

• We don’t allow blockers to prevent us from delivering. We step out of our comfort zone to find solutions and collaborate with other teams to advance initiatives.

• We say things as they are, we don’t beat around the bush, we don’t waste time.

• We ship.

Our products

We have a suite of standalone API products that automate tax-related workflows for any internet company which all together build a comprehensive platform. Those products are Lookup, Tax, Returns, Data sharing and E-Invoicing.

We may discover new customer needs as we learn and develop new products as needed.

Our API docs

For you as an engineer, API documentation is probably an important part when considering a new career move. Thanks to the API docs, you can recognise how an API works and how it is structured.

Please visit our API documentation to learn more about our API endpoints and their usage: https://docs.fonoa.com/.

Our Tech Stack

Fonoa has a suite of API products that automate tax-related workflows for any internet company. Check them out below:

• For the backend, we use Node and Go.

• For the front end, we use ReactJS, htmx and Typescript.

• For persistence, we use PostgreSQL.

• We use GCP for our cloud services.

• We manage our infrastructure with Terraform, Kubernetes CRDs, ArgoCD, Prometheus, and DataDog.

“As an engineer, I follow a product through its lifecycle, from ideation to delivery and support, which gives a lot of exposure to the technology and customer needs. This allows me to learn to improve both myself and the product constantly.” - Philip Beel, Engineering Manager.

• Learn about how painful it is for companies to manually handle the tax lifecycle, and think about how our systems change the status quo.

• Run a product engineering team, aligning business objectives with technical delivery.

• Partnering with the Product Manager, co-owning the product roadmap

• Guiding on day-to-day tactical work, hiring, onboarding, developing and mentoring. Your success is your team’s success.

• Contribute to the broader engineering culture and goals by collaborating on high-level strategy with other Engineering Managers and our CTO.

• Continuously strive to build the best API product, leveraging the best experience and capabilities.

• You are fully proficient in English. Written and spoken, as we are a bunch from around the world, but we work in English.

• You optimise for distributed and asynchronous work, favouring documenting and taking notes over having ad-hoc face-to-face meetings that leave no trace and exclude the people who were not around at the right time.

• You have a strong sense of ownership, you care about what you build, and you are building the right thing that serves your customers.

• You focus on people; you are able to hire the right people, distribute and organise, are able to develop your team through constant feedback, keep them healthy and focus on retention

• You like to optimise processes to speed up product development without sacrificing quality.

• You’re a builder at heart. You enjoy the opportunity to have extensive exposure, making things work for a company in the long term, and having an entrepreneurial attitude towards anything that comes your way.

• You are either eager to learn or comfortable scaling and operating large-scale microservices in high-load and growth environments.

• You are knowledgeable in several languages. Most of our current codebase is in Go and Typescript

• You enjoy removing unused features more than shipping new things that no one cares about. You run away from the success theatre.

• You ship small things fast, continuously, and iteratively, learning on each step.

• You like to use data over opinions to make decisions. And are okay with finding the data yourself when it’s missing.

• You are comfortable with change, whether it involves adjusting priorities, setting new goals, or meeting deadlines. You see this more as an opportunity than a hurdle. You are also comfortable with challenging the status quo and pushing for change.

• You’re looking to make a serious impact and are excited about working in a high-growth startup.

As part of the recruitment process at Fonoa, we process your personal data in accordance with our Privacy Notice for Job Applicants. This notice explains how and why your data is collected and used, and how you can contact us if you have any concerns.