Lead Product Engineer

About us: Gravity Sketch is the category leader in solving the challenges faced by teams that design 3D products. Our platform enables teams to create and communicate 3D ideas in the quickest and most intuitive way possible - whether they are globally distributed or in the same geography. The platform is changing the way companies like Adidas and Ford carry out their day-to-day design work, helping to increase creativity, productivity, collaboration and compressing time to market. We take a B2C approach to B2B, nurturing a large community of highly engaged design and engineering professionals using the product to redefine their digital design workflow. The Gravity Sketch platform is accessible across VR and web-based applications allowing users to integrate GS seamlessly into their workflow.

Our Culture: We’re a lean but ambitious team of 50+ spread across the globe. We may be geographically spread out, but we’re tied by our mission to radically change how teams communicate ideas spatially and expressively from anywhere! Our focus is on output and getting the work done, not counting the hours you work. We appreciate that everyone has their own optimum setup, so provide flexibility in terms of when and where you get work done.

Our Values:

• Curiosity: Always be in learning mode, Go Deep: ask the why/why not, Explore and have fun.
• Empathy: Put ourselves in the shoes of our customer, Be genuinely caring and respectful, Act from a place of understanding/longing to understand.
• Force Multiplier: Make everyone around us/you better, Raise the Bar, Deliver Results.
• Resourceful: Take calculated risks, Use what we have/ deliver the most value, Stay Hungry.

Our values are at the heart of our culture, we encourage everyone to experiment, bring new ideas to the table, and challenge one another to arrive at the best solutions for our users. We work hard, and know how to have fun too; with company trips, socials, sports, gaming sessions and more. We welcome you to share your hobbies with the team so we can all try something new!

Role Summary: As a Lead Product Engineer in the CollabCore team at Gravity Sketch, you’ll be instrumental in developing the collaborative features of our platform, enabling multiple users to interact and create together in real time. You’ll tackle complex technical challenges like verifying user experiences for a high performance 3D environment, architect efficient solutions to ensure low latency collaboration, and contribute innovative features that empower designers globally to collaborate seamlessly and push the boundaries of 3D design. You will focus on making design work fun and simple, enabling seamless collaboration in the Gravity Sketch ecosystem.

The challenge: Work on a novel 3D collaboration platform to empower designers and their collaborators to bring a wide variety of products to life. Constructing scalable infrastructure and code to manage increasing concurrent users and intricate 3D models. This requires resolving performance issues, enhancing network traffic, and guaranteeing system responsiveness and stability under growing usage. Ensure that Gravity Sketch’s collaborative features work seamlessly across VR, screen, and web. This is technically challenging due to the complexities of real-time collaboration across these different platforms and the infrastructure required. Developing a framework of tools for monitoring, testing, and analysing the performance of collaborative features within a 3D, VR-compatible environment. This involves creating specialised test frameworks, diagnostic tools, and automated deployment pipelines tailored for this unique setting. Champion and mentor good practices for engineers that are less experienced to ensure the team grows in its effectiveness. Embrace failures to learn how to improve products and processes. Obsess over understanding users and their use cases. All in the pursuit of quick product validation and rising to the challenge of building success on multitudes of failures.

Key Responsibilities:

• Design, develop, and maintain high-quality, scalable, and testable code for our collaborative 3D design platform.
• Collaborate with designers, product managers, and other engineers to define and implement new features and improvements.
• Debug and resolve complex technical issues related to real-time collaboration.
• Write unit and integration tests to ensure the reliability and robustness of the software.
• Take ownership of code reviews and actively lead efforts to enhance our development processes.
• Champion our product practices, validations and principles through a deep product knowledge and understanding to drive product development with a user-centric approach, crafting and leading the implementation of seamless, fun, simple, and intuitive user experiences.
• Quickly validate hypotheses and assumptions through experimentation to ensure we are delivering the correct user experiences and making progress towards our business and team goals.

Who are we looking for?

• Expertise in languages such as Java, C#, or Go (or similar backend languages).
• Expertise with cloud technologies such as Kubernetes, AWS, and terraform (or similar infrastructure).
• Proven ability to develop user-facing products that simplify complex tools and processes, with a focus on creating intuitive and enjoyable user experiences.
• Experience leading projects delivering user facing product features.
• Experience assisting teammates, providing actionable/constructive feedback and guidance while showing care, proactively sharing knowledge, and contributing to team improvement through discussion.
• Lead cross-team projects, communicate clearly, participate in on-call rotation, and follow core engineering processes.

Bonus points for:

• Practical experience in developing and maintaining real-time collaborative systems.
• Familiarity with engines like Unity and related 3D technologies.
• Able to work from our Brixton studio at least once a week.