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It's that time again, Mr. Freeman…
I'm on a recruiting contract again \o/

Currently drafting the offers, but I figure I might as well invite all of you in already.

This round I'm hiring for two positions: a "Confirmed Backend Engineer" (Confirmed means between Senior and Junior, it's French terminology), and a "Senior Technical Product Manager" (this is a misnomer, read on for further details).

Before I talk about what the actual positions are, let's go over why you might want to work here or not. I won't talk about the company itself (I can, but this post is long enough as it is, feel free to ask in DMs).

The advantages are: fully remote company, French CDI contract (very good job security, worker's rights), healthcare coverage, not agile or scrum (ShapeUp methodology with some tweaks; notably more people are allowed to do shaping), actual opportunity for advancement (it has happened several times in the last year alone, on record, in a company that has 15 people in it total), proper async communication, no investors (fully bootstrapped company), no microsoft (google workspace, slack, linux/macos (your choice, they've got a guy I hired that's running oasis lmao)).

The disadvantages are: relatively low salaries (they're more in line with "small French company" than "Parisian startup"), classic growing pains ("we rushed this out and now we have to maintain it, oh no"), mostly lame stack (python django postgres vue; infra side is a different kind of lame with k8s terraform fluxcd).

I am handling the recruiting process end-to-end, meaning that there's no real difference between chatting to me here and just sending an application to the links (that don't exist yet). This does mean that if you're interested, you'll still be funneled through the same process everyone else goes through, but since I'm handling it it's not going to take very long :)

Now as for the positions… remember that the seniority measures are by *my* standards, not industry standards; so "Senior" (for example) doesn't mean "15 years of experience", but very specific skill and outlook related things. This can be an advantage or a disadvantage.

For the backend dev, the goal isn't to have someone with high responsibilities (unless you want to grow into those), but simply increase capacity : be able to tackle more ShapeUp projects per cycle (if you're not familiar, 6 week cycles with 2 week cooldowns). You'd work with the other devs and with the infra team. You should be able to lead backend projects on your own (where you have the skills required), but you won't be expected to lead infra projects; but you *will* be expected to be able to contribute to both. Linux skill is a must at minimum, and ideally you should be able to go a bit beyond that (not to mention software engineering).

For the "product manager" the general idea is someone that'll be able to have a holistic view of the product, with the technical chops to know what's feasible/easy/hard so as to work in the right direction. You'd interact with clients, understand how they use the product, figure out what the underlying problems are, figure out how we're solving them, find the issues (both qualitative and categorical). The goal will be for you to write up projects (shaping position), but then be able to contribute to their implementation as well (you're not just "architecting" something and then handing it over). You should be well-versed in software engineering as a whole, but the focus is going to be more on front-end, UX, and everything people-facing; the backend stuff you just need to understand deeply *enough* to not uh, "oh just put it all into microservices it'll be fine".

If you're interested in either of these positions, want more details, etc; feel free to send me a DM. If I don't *already* know you then chances are I'll mostly just direct you to the hiring process everyone has to deal with (but like I said, I'm handling the whole thing end-to-end anyway). If I *do* already know you, you'll probably get a whole of a lot more information as a side :)

One also one more thing: you'll need to be situated in Europe / North Africa, and legally have the right to work in France. Exceptions can be made, but it'd be *extremely* difficult for complicated reasons. You can ask, but expect me to say "not happening" 99% of the time. Feel free to boost!

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update: one of the positions (the dev one) is now live; the second position got rebranded as "Senior Technical Product Owner" and some details are shuffled, but the general idea is the same (ShapeUp shaper position, rethinking stuff and making it more uniform, participating in implementation)
if you're interested in the backend position (salary range now known: 42-48k/yr, told you it's small company wages!) the time to apply is… right now (you'll need to apply by tomorrow evening to be in the first round of interviews; it's not super likely that there will be more than 2)
@ignaloidas the way tax works in france is a huge amount of it is paid by the employer, you never get to see it
there's still income tax, but the brackets are tiny
but you ALSO have "cotisations", which is kind of like tax, but it's going towards specific things that benefit you (e.g. public health insurance, retirement, etc)

so for the 42-48k that you're paid, the employer pays around 70-80k total
then you end up getting something like 2.7-2.8k supernet / month

the terminology goes like this:
employer pays (including employer taxes) the "coût employeur", it's 70-80k but you never hear about it
the employee then receives the remaining 42-48k as the "brut" (gross)
then from this are deducted the cotisations, leaving you with the "net avant prélèvement à la source"
then a % is deduced from this based on your tax withholding settings (you set those!), giving you the "net"
then, at the end of the fiscal year, they figure out what your actual taxes are, and figure out how much you need to pay / be reimbursed, relative to how much was withheld, giving you the "supernet"
usually the net and supernet should be quite close but you can do Funny Things

salaries are communicated in "brut", but if you're doing a b2b contract then it's done in equivalent TJM (daily rate), which will look higher but realistically it's quite similar
@lain @ignaloidas it's why doing portage in france is a bit of a no-brainer on all sides if you have ANY safety net (the only real disadvantages of portage/freelancing is that there's a legal limit to how long you can work in one place, and the notice period is much shorter (oh no ONLY an ENTIRE MONTH??