We here at Jellyvision are the proud parents of ALEX® (https://www.jellyvision.com/solutions/), an interactive employee communications platform that happens to share some DNA (and a sense of humor) with the smash-hit trivia video game YOU DON’T KNOW JACK®, created by Jellyvision's founder. ALEX makes navigating tricky decisions—like choosing and using employee benefits or improving your financial wellness—easier, faster, and more helpful, not to mention entertaining. The success of the ALEX platform has exceeded our wildest dreams, (except for the part right before we woke up where our mom was riding a giraffe), which is why we need talented folks like you to help us help ALEX take over the world…er…continue to grow and succeed.

So what's this job about?

We are Jellyvision’s internal support team. That means you'll be working with the Jellyfolk who use and implement the tools and products we make, fixing the problems that they have and putting the sunshine back in their day. And when something big breaks, it’ll be your job to get a team together and direct them toward a fix — and lead the effort to make sure it won’t happen again.

An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, though, so you'll also be looking for ways to predict and prevent problems. That explanation you just gave an account manager? Maybe it deserves a wiki page for easy reference next time. That data mismatch you just found? Write a tool to check all our customers for the issue. When you see an opportunity to make someone's work easier (including your own!), you won't have to wait until a lean sprint to do it — instead, it's literally your team's mission.

Both of these responsibilities will put you in contact with people all over the company. Support fosters a strong sense of collaboration, and that doesn't stop with tech: you'll build close relationships with QA analysts, account managers, product owners, and a lot of other people. Everyone at Jellyvision is smart, but not everyone has a technical background, and you'll need to demonstrate respect for their strengths while complementing them with your own. Whether you got your tech chops from a college degree, a boot camp, or teaching yourself on the side, you'll be combining those skills with empathy, communication, and leadership to push the whole organization forward with your work.

How do I know if I'm right for this?

In most job descriptions, we'd list a bunch of languages and frameworks here (and don't worry, that's coming later). But even more important to us in this position is someone who demonstrates:

• Patience and empathy: By the time someone is asking you for help, it's probably the worst day of their week. You'll need to be able to discover and understand not only their problem, but all the context and feelings that come with that problem. Then you'll get back to solid ground and work with them until their problem is solved.
• A talent for troubleshooting: On the Support team, you're going to spend a lot of time looking for root causes, so it'll go a lot easier if debugging brings you joy, not frustration. You'll need to plan, consider, and act, rather than just try a bunch of stuff to see what works. You should be able to sustain yourself on incremental progress rather than waiting for the a-ha moment, working the problem until you find something that fits.
• Excellent communication abilities: It’s important to be able to understand how a system works, but we want to see that you can distill that understanding into instructions, training sessions, and other documentation that's accessible to people at varying levels of technical ability. You should be the kind of person who is beloved by their coworkers for the clarity and usefulness of their comments on tickets, READMEs, and emails.
• Leadership and mentorship: As a senior engineer, the responsibility of guiding our junior engineers falls partly on your shoulders. We want you to be excited to share your expertise and experience with teammates of all skill levels, through both formal training sessions and everyday collaboration. Additionally, you should be able to take charge of a team project and see it through, getting buy-in and enlisting help as needed.
• Proactiveness and curiosity: The flip side of helping people is setting them up to not need help in the first place. Once an issue comes up a few times, you should be looking to stop it from coming up ever again. And it’s not just technical issues: when you notice that your process has bottlenecks, do you go looking for the best way to fix them?
• The ability to build bridges: When you're trying to triage the three things on your plate, it helps to have good relationships with the people your decision will affect. You should be a natural at reaching out beyond your team and building trust with people in other departments, so you can lean on them during crunch time.

Support engineers need to be generalists, able to poke at every part of the stack, but for this role we want some specific skills too. Here’s what we’d like to see from your technical skills and experience:

• JavaScript, HTML, and CSS: A deep and nuanced understanding of how JavaScript, the DOM, Web APIs, and HTTP all interact is crucial for this role. You should also be familiar with the current JavaScript ecosystem, including how to write applications using things like ES6, Node, Redux and Webpack.
• Databases: We use MySQL (and some other stuff), so you should be well-versed in how to write queries for traditional RDBMSs. NoSQL (Couch or MongoDB) and SQLite experience is a plus.
• Debugging and architecture: You’ll be doing a lot of troubleshooting in the browser itself, so you should be skilled at debugging a frontend in browser dev tools (mostly Chrome’s). You should be comfortable using and interrogating APIs, and have a sense for how frontends, backends, databases, and other services work together in a web app.
• Toolmaking: Support makes tools to investigate, solve, and prevent problems, so we want to see some tools or libraries you wrote that make it easier for people to do things without thinking too hard about them, and be prepared to tell us why your tool solves a problem better than the alternatives.
• Shells and scripting: You'll be working on the command line a lot, so being comfortable in the shell will serve you well. You should have no trouble quickly whipping up a script (in bash, Node, or whatever), and the ability to turn that one-off script into a tool that others can use is useful too.
• Power user sense: Not everything you encounter will be a problem with code: sometimes you'll need to clear a cache or check a firewall setting or look at background processes. Because of this, you should have a good idea of where the knobs and levers are for common software like Chrome, Firefox, IE, Safari, macOS, iOS, and Windows.
• Other stuff: Our backends are variously written in Ruby, Node, PHP, and Python. Support is usually reading this code, not writing it, so if you know at least one of those languages, you’ll be able to muddle through. 

ANYTHING ELSE?  Yes. We share a commitment to excellence and a desire to work in a comfortable, friendly atmosphere, so we only hire nice, bright, funny people who are willing to work hard.  Our credo is a simple one: be helpful. And we think we can be most helpful if our workforce is as diverse in thought, perspective, and culture as the people who use our products. We are looking to add amazing folks to our team who will bring diversity across many lines, including race, ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation, age, marital status, disability, gender identity, sex, and country of origin.

Thanks for your interest in Jellyvision!