At Medium, we want to hire people who like building interesting things and figuring out original ways to solve hard, important problems.

We’re not looking for textbook engineers. We need more than that to build a platform that enables the sharing of ideas and experiences that will change the world.

We’re looking to build the best team that can solve tough challenges and unearth possibilities with the greatest potential. In order to do so, we need people who love what they do, while being unrelenting in their ambition to learn more.

What is the role?

There is no typical Medium software engineer — it’s a fluid role. You make it your own. Jamie Talbot, currently an engineer at Medium, is a great example of how it’s done.

“You work across some window of these three roles: frontend, backend, and infrastructure. This is what’s interesting about Medium. I do some backend and frontend; we’re not pigeon-holed into one role.”

You turn this role into what you want, based on what you’re passionate about, what you want to learn, and where opportunities exist for Medium. You have the authority to influence product decisions and set your own priorities based on the projects you are working on. We’re looking for people who want to be involved in and even lead these initiatives.

Jamie did this with one of his first projects at Medium. While working on our personalized reading list feature (PRL as we call it internally), which suggests stories to users based on their activity on Medium, Jamie recommended that the homepage should explain to users why each story was suggested. This requirement necessitated more careful thinking about which stories are shown to readers. Jamie worked closely with our product team, wrote the technical design with Andrew Liu, another engineer here at Medium, and then led a small team in writing the code. Engineers here work on cross-functional teams with designers to realize the best features and experiences for our users.

As Jamie explains:

“I have more influence as an engineer here than I’ve had at other companies. Not just in a tactical sense, though we have autonomy over technical decisions, which is rewarding. People are gracious enough to let me pipe up about product design and have opinions on those as well. Here you get to actually influence product development, because we have people who are very open and receptive to ideas throughout the company.”

What skills do you need?

A strong coding background is important to be successful in this role. Elizabeth Ford, who started at Medium as a backend engineer and has recently transitioned to mobile, provides more insight on her experiences:

“We use JavaScript on the backend and frontend. I came from a Java background, which has some similarities but some nuances I had to figure out. Our framework, Shepherd, is a bit different from other web application frameworks I had seen before, but it was fun to learn.”

“If you come in being flexible and open to learning, you’ll do well here.”

Elizabeth explains that engineers also must be able to see the big picture while paying attention to necessary details. Natural problem solving skills are extremely valuable, as well as the ability to listen and share expertise. This makes our team stronger as a whole.

“Knowledge doesn’t just reside at the top; people are more open to sharing information regardless of experience. We all want to learn new things. We’re all paddling in the boat; no one has the incentive to hold on to a bunch of knowledge for just themselves and be the expert. That doesn’t help the company.”

What kinds of people are hired in this role?

Curiosity, awareness, resoluteness, and empathy are qualities we look for in engineering candidates at Medium. Dan Pupius, Lead of Engineering and former Gmail alum, describes these traits in more detail in his Medium post.

Being an engineer at Medium sometimes means creating or filling new roles as you see fit, even if they aren’t purely technical. We hire people who can wear multiple hats, be aware and see the company holistically, and take the initiative to improve areas of the company that need some work.

Jean Hsu has done this more than once at Medium. She felt that Medium’s Stats feature could use an upgrade, so she took the initiative to draft a project brief to explore some new design directions for Stats. The project was given the green light, and she took on the role of Project Lead to lead a small team with one of our designers and Mike Sall, our product scientist. Together, they built a prototype that set a strong vision and foundation to implement the feature in the near future.

Jean also noticed that we were missing some opportunities when onboarding new hires on the engineering team. She proposed a new Engineering Onboarding role, which she ended up filling, to make the process seamless and consistent. She organizes the ramp-up plan for each of our new engineers, including milestones and goals, and engages other engineers to participate, making the experience more productive and smooth for the team.