Lead Consultant (Senior Software Developer) (Surry Hills, Australia)

no moss in a nutshell.

At no moss, our purpose is our people's purpose. That means that every day, we're looking for ways to help you find your purpose, and spend your life in its pursuit and maximisation. We call that the #PursuitOfTheUngooglable. We're less a company than an anarchist commune of highly driven people who have aligned purposes. Together, we're looking at radically new ways to create economic value together, in four major patterns – consultancy, products, innovation, and doing good.

What was a hypothesis three short years ago is now a consultancy on the AFR Fast 100 @ #86, and #9 on the Deloitte Tech Fast 50 Rising Stars, an interactive arts & games studio written about in PC Powerplay featuring an unprecedented 32 games created in 16 months, an innovation program delivering outcomes to The Centre of Independent Studies, the CSIRO and Hello Sunday Morning (the winner of Google's Impact Challenge) as well as founding, funding and supporting over 4,500 micro-volunteers in six countries to complete nearly 20,000 acts of good via our non-profit, Cause Corps.

About 10% of our profits go directly toward our non-profit partners, including One Child and Cause Corps; and our skilled volunteering opportunities are directed toward the latter.

As a consultancy, we provide a special rate card accessible only to non profits, helping everything from Indigenous students get connected to scholarships to teaching kids about recycling and ocean plastic via games.

We hire for people who want to learn and grow and #DoTheUngooglable; and we have a deep culture of teaching "a rolling stone gathers no moss", looking after each other "it's okay to not be okay", and customer delight "a certain polish."

you need.

A consultancy, a product incubator, an innovation hub that prizes three things:

1. a system of radical transparency. We talk about the customers we lose openly and the reasons why we lost them so we can talk about how to improve together; we publish our games (failed or successful) online to demonstrate our learning journey; we have an internally transparent salary grading and rate card, allowing everybody to know what everybody else makes for themselves and for the company. We make all this and more visible all the time to allow our people to focus instead on making things (and each other) better.
2. a place that values drive. On your first day, expect to be handed a blank sheet of paper and asked: what is your purpose in life? You'll be asked to think about it, and declare it openly and hang it on the office wall, alongside those of every other no mosser. You'll spend your career with us in its renewal, pursuit, refinement and sometimes rejection of this declared purpose as you discover something else. Along the way, you'll gain mastery of your craft (if you don't already have it); perhaps a mastery of a (few) new crafts; and definitely mastery of teaching others what you know.
3. an ecosystem of wholeness. We like you for all of you; not just the 'work face' you've been putting on. We like that you were a childhood piano prodigy, or had a previous career in construction. We respect that you dedicate your spare time to writing science fiction, or what you really care about is surfing with your children. We admire that your purpose is to take people off the streets, to create safe environments for people to grow and excel, or to challenge the notion that work-life balance isn't just 'life balance'. There's room for diversity of thought at no moss, and we're privileged to continually better our ecosystem toward that end.

you like.

Getting stuff done. A rigorous process that uplifts people and enables them to be the rolling stone that attains a certain polish. You want to add to these organisational learnings and make us better. You want to share what you already know for the betterment of your colleagues, freely and joyfully. You enjoy putting the extra (smartly chosen) mile in to not work hard, but work effectively. You like conversations where we celebrate failing – personal, team-based, organisational – and subsequent learning.

you expect.

Other people who are purpose driven. People who value psychological safety. A place where people are good at listening and incredible at taking appropriate action. To be free to challenge the status quo and each other to greater things. An ecosystem of people who are outside their comfort zone nearly all the time, working mostly in their learning zone, occasionally edging into their terror zone.

we like.

People who don't need us; but are connected to our story and are inspired to be part of a community. People who want to give back to ecosystems that are finding new, more human ways of working.

we expect.

People who do what they say and say what they'll do. Outcome driven people who have a history of trying – resulting in both successes and learnings from their failures. People who love any one of strategic consulting, products and computer gaming, and technological innovation.

we need.

You are not just simply someone who has a love for solving challenging technical problems, you also have a deep human drive to coach and help those around you be better and more capable people, and are a champion for continuous improvement of the practices in your team.

You are able to self-manage with a consulting client plus mentor between two or three other No Mossers. You have had a history of leading technology teams on projects from small "single-developer" projects up through to large projects with multiple squads, each with around six developers (or if you don't already have this experience you are excited to develop it).

You have worked in Scrum and/or Kanban environment, not just for their buzzword but for measurable, empirical outcomes. If you haven't, we will teach you.

We are open to people who have never formally done this role but aspire to, as well as people who have experience in this role – we'll grade and craft the role for you assuming a cultural growth alignment (not just cultural "fit") with us.

We work with clients, from visionary founders with a dream, to budding scale ups with millions in funding and market traction, to well established enterprises in the top ASX 20. We work across a wide variety of industries, from retail to non profit to banking to aged care.

Joining as a Lead Consultant (Software Developer), you will:

• Develop high-quality software design and architecture, by studying the needs of the business and users, studying systems flow, data usage and work processes and investigate problem areas.
• Identify, prioritise and execute tasks in an agile software development lifecycle.
• Develop tools and applications by producing clean, efficient code.
• Automate tasks through appropriate tools and scripting.
• Be value focused - understand how to collaboratively work towards building the most valuable part of any system, with the information available right now. Resist the urge to gold plate in favour of building validatable increments of code that deliver value to stakeholders.
• Build a shared understanding of technical solutions with both technical and business stakeholders, such as though facilitating workshops, developing documentation, flowcharts, layouts, diagrams, code comments and clear code.
• Lead and participate in practices that add to the software quality, such as reviewing pull requests, configuring linter rules, setting up automated testing and performing validation and verification testing.
• Coach and grow the capability of the developers in your team.
• Lead 'in house' efforts that actively contributes to the culture, knowledge and organisational norms.

Our people:

• Ask each other and the people we work with - "How are you?" and listen.
• Independently seek to learn and grow, and are motivated to teach and grow others.
• Rise to challenges and are resourceful in solving problems.
• Celebrate each other's success.

Benefits

• Our purpose is our people's purpose.
• An ecosystem of wholeness. We like you for all of you; not just the 'work face'.
• About 10% of our profits go directly toward our non-profit partners.
• Open to discuss flexible working arrangements at the interview stage
• Paid Parental Leave
  • 6 weeks Paid Parental Leave at full salary for primary carer (not including government-funded parental leave)
  • 2 weeks Paid Parental Leave at full salary for secondary carer
  • Continuation of superannuation payments whilst on paid and unpaid Parental Leave
• Opportunities to purchase leave
• Paid volunteer days with Cause Corps, our not-for-profit micro-volunteering organisation whose mission is to "make doing good a daily habit."

Skills & Requirements

To express your interest in this role for when it opens up, we ask that you:

• Candidate must be based in Sydney or Melbourne
• Submit a cover letter and include your answers to the following questions:
  1. What is No Moss' Purpose; and
  2. In your own words, what do you think it means?
• have 3+ years of experience as a software developer.
• have subject matter expertise across a full development stack: front-end and back-end. Front-end such as HTML/CSS, Strong JS understanding. Back-end such as Node/Express/Sails, PHP/Laravel/Symfony/CakePHP, Python/Django and Java/Spring Boot.
• have deep experience of at least one of Angular, React and VueJS.

• are an Australian citizen or hold a current visa to work in Australia.
• have a willingness to apply the principles of software engineering in new environments, on new platforms and to new business domains.

Not required but highly desired:

• Experience using system monitoring tools (such as New Relic) and automated testing frameworks.
• Native mobile experience (iOS, Android) or hybrid experience
• Experience with React development.
• In-depth knowledge of relational databases (such as MySQL, PostgreSQL) and document-based databases (e.g. MongoDB).
• Experience working in an agile software development lifecycle.
• Experience working as a delivery lead or "Scrum Master".
• Competent linux management (VIM, deploying apps, scripting) and basic cloud environment setup.
• Docker as a virtual dev env & deployment.
• Bachelor degree in Software Engineering, Computer Science or a related degree.