Lead/Senior Software Engineer, Acceleration

Who we are:

Want to make an impact? Join our pack and come work (and play!) with us.

We believe everyone deserves the unconditional love of a pet—and at Rover, our mission is to make it easier to experience that love. Founded in 2011, the Rover app and website connect dog and cat parents with loving pet sitters and dog walkers in neighborhoods across the US, Canada, and Europe. We empower our community of trusted pet sitters and dog walkers to run their own pet care businesses on Rover with the tools and security of a global company to back them.

Headquartered in Seattle, Washington, we work closely with our teams in Barcelona, San Antonio, Spokane, and remote locations. We’ve got a reputation for being a great place to work, having been named among the 100 Best Companies to Work For in Seattle Business Magazine and Washington’s Best Workplaces in the Puget Sound Business Journal. We\’re an agile, fast-growing company, and our leadership comes from some of the world\’s most respected tech companies.

At Rover, our furry coworkers are just as important as our human ones—and we wouldn’t have it any other way. Along with making the joys of pet parenthood more accessible, we’re committed to fostering a diverse, inclusive, and welcoming community of pet people—and that starts with our employees.

This role is approved for Sponsorship and provides relocation assistance to Barcelona. This role is permanent/full-time and hybrid (Mondays & Thursdays in our office in Poblenou in Barcelona.

Rover’s Acceleration team is looking for an experienced Senior Engineer to take a leadership role on our team as we experiment to find new ways to grow Rover’s business and serve more pet-lovers around the world. Join this exciting, fast-paced, collaborative team where you can be at the forefront of Rover’s mission to make it possible for everyone to experience the love of a pet!

About the Acceleration Team

As a member of the Acceleration Engineering team, you will drive innovation and growth by developing creative, data-driven solutions to acquire new pet owners into our platform. Our mission is to expand our community by creating engaging user experiences, while leveraging the product to organically reach prospect customers. From building referral programs to integrating partnerships and giving our sitters tools to promote themselves, we focus on creating seamless, impactful pathways that welcome pet owners to our vibrant ecosystem. Join us in shaping the future of pet care by bringing more owners into our ever-growing community!

Acceleration Team Projects

We explore innovative approaches to drive growth on the Rover platform. This could be a wide range of things, including:

– Building tools to help Rover pet sitters promote their business

– Increasing word-of-mouth traffic through social sharing (who doesn’t love cute pet content?)

– Engaging with pet lovers at times when they aren’t actively looking for pet care

– Partnering with other businesses that serve the pet-loving community

– Whatever great ideas you bring to the table!

Acceleration Team Challenges

Great Software Engineers love to be challenged. The Acceleration team at Rover has no shortage of hard problems that you could help us solve:

– We often invest in new ideas for growth with a lot of uncertainty. We need to find ways to learn quickly, launch many small experiments, and turn the insights into meaningful new features. This means we’ll need to get creative to move fast and collaborate really closely with product and design.

– We work across the entire codebase and need to ensure we maintain a high-quality product. We want to lean more on test automation. We already have very high unit and integration test coverage, but we’ve struggled to make end-to-end testing work reliably across our web and mobile applications. This is a big opportunity for us to improve both our test coverage and our efficiency as a team.

– Across Rover, we are in the process of migrating our large web and mobile applications to Next.js and Expo (React meta-frameworks). Some of our features need to be uplifted to these technologies, so that we can iterate on them faster and bring consistency across platforms. We are also working on building some features, with the goal of enabling most of the code to be shared across all platforms.

This (of course) is not a complete list, but it gives you some idea of the big problems we’re thinking about and that you could contribute to as a member of the Rover Engineering team!

Senior Engineering at Rover

Senior Engineers are the core of engineering teams at Rover and have a number of key responsibilities:

– You lead technical planning and execution of the team’s most complex projects – working closely with product managers and UX designers to develop a hypothesis, refine scope, identify requirements, implement, and ship a feature

– You are the technical reference for the team, providing architectural guidance, holding a high standard, and setting the example

– You partner closely with the team’s Engineering Manager to shape the team’s technical roadmap and prioritize technical investment

– You ensure operational excellence of the features your team owns

– You act as a mentor for the other engineers on your team, helping them to acquire new skills and grow in their careers

– You are constantly learning and sharing knowledge with your team and the rest of the engineering organization as you learn new things

– You communicate communicate clearly with stakeholders and can analyze and use data to back up your positions

What Makes Rover Engineering Unique?

Rover is a place where Software Engineers tend to stay and build a career for a long time. People are usually curious about why that is, so here are some of the things that are unique about our culture:

– We really love pets. This is probably an obvious one, but it can’t be overstated. We are surrounded by dogs in the office, and we take time to pet them in between meetings. Our Slack is full of cute pet pictures and memes. More than anything, we love building a product for the pet-loving community that we’re a part of.

– We are product engineers who work across Rover’s technology stack and are more focused on building an excellent product for our community than we are on specific technologies.

– When designing our software systems, we prioritize empowering engineers to make the maximum impact across the product and minimizing friction or artificial roadblocks.

– We innovate where it counts to improve the lives of pet owners and care providers. We have several hackathons throughout the year where engineers can unleash their creativity to dream up new products and experiences.

– We believe in the power of in-person collaboration balanced with flexibility. We have a hybrid working model, where we gather face-to-face (including dogs!) twice a week in the office. We also host periodic global summits, such as our Tech Summit in Seattle. We also have a generous temporary remote work policy that allows you to travel and work from anywhere in the world for a month per year.

– We want our team to reflect the community we serve, and diversity is not only important but also imperative to our mission. This is why we have partnered with organizations like Ada Developer Academy in Seattle and allWomen in Barcelona to help close the gender gap in tech.

– We invest in our team’s growth and have a strong commitment to professional development. We have well-defined career paths for both individual contributors and managers that enable engineers to grow in the company by leveraging their strengths.

– As a team, we are devoted to each other. We root for each other to succeed and support each other in both work and life. This is so core to who we are that we’ve codified it in our company values.

Rover\’s Barcelona Office

Rover was founded in Seattle, but we began building an office in Barcelona in 2018. Since then, the team has grown considerably, and today some of our most important projects are led by teams in Barcelona. We have a new, spacious office in 22@ Poble Nou, featuring lots of natural light, ample space for team collaboration, and a beautiful outdoor terrace for enjoying the Barcelona weather. Our Workplace Experience team creates a fun atmosphere by planning regular special events in the office, as well as occasional catered breakfasts or lunches.

Our Core Booking teams, Trust & Safety, Growth, and Mergers & Acquisitions Integration teams are all led out of the Barcelona office, among others. While we work closely with teams in Seattle to build Rover’s product, teams in Barcelona are colocated, cross-functional, and independent. The Barcelona engineering team also hosts our own bi-weekly knowledge-sharing sessions and quarterly hackathons.

We aspire to make Barcelona a fully realized second headquarters for Rover, and that means hiring many talented engineers like you!

Successful Senior Engineers at Rover typically have the following qualifications:

• 7+ years of experience as a professional software developer
• Experience building web and/or mobile applications
• Demonstrated ability to quickly learn new technologies
• Experience with technologies similar to Rover’s tech stack: React, React Native, Python, and Django (exact match not necessary, we believe great engineers come from all kinds of technical backgrounds!)
• Experience leading complex projects on collaborative, cross-functional teams
• Solid knowledge and understanding of relational databases and schema design
• Passionate about automated testing, code quality, and general software engineering best practices

Benefits of Working at Rover:

• Competitive compensation
• Long-term incentive plan with a company performance-based cash payout
• Permanent contract
• Pension Plan
• Private health insurance
• Monthly home internet stipend
• 25 Days of paid vacation leave
• Annual professional development budget for training or conferences
• Meal vouchers through Cobee
• Discounted gym membership and other health benefits
• Bring your dog to work (and unlimited puppy time)
• Monetary help for adopting a dog plus yearly credit to use on our platform
• Flexible work hours, sometimes you’ll need to be in at certain times, but on the whole, we’re pretty flexible when it comes to managing workload and time
• Employee Resource Groups, like Gender Equity @ Rover and Rover Pride, to connect with colleagues across the organization, support each other, and create dialogue
• Grab snacks, fresh fruit, in our kitchen to keep yourself going
• Regular team activities, including happy hours, game nights, and more

Locations:

• This position is located at our Barcelona office.
• Applicants must currently have the right to live and work in Spain. We can help with relocation assistance, though!

Rover is an equal-opportunity employer committed to promoting a diverse, inclusive, and inventive environment with the best employees. We’re driven by seeing our people succeed and grow, and we work to ensure everyone contributes to their fullest potential.We consider all qualified applicants without regard to age, race, color, ancestry, national origin, religion, disability, protected veteran status, sex, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, or any other protected status in accordance with applicable laws, regulations, and ordinances.