Tech Lead Insights (Ruby & Applied NLP)

Over deze job

Do you want to join us on our mission to shape democracies for the digital age? Are you looking for an international and fast-paced, yet collaborative and inclusive environment to thrive in?

You have come to the right place.

CitizenLab, a social impact scale-up with its HQ in Brussels, aims to make public decision-making more participatory, inclusive, and responsive. The SaaS platform is already being used by over 230 cities and municipalities in +10 different countries, facilitating two-way communication between governments and their citizens. Since it was founded in 2015, CitizenLab gave +500,000 citizens a direct voice in local politics and got recognized as 'Best Social Impact Startup in Europe'. CitizenLab is looking for purpose-driven talent to join us on our mission to have +2.5 million citizens actively participate via its e-democracy platforms in cities across the globe.

Wat zal je doen?

As the tech lead of the insights squad, your goal is to help your four squad colleagues align on priorities, task decomposition and planning. The Insights squad has one clear mission: make all the citizen inputs collected through our platform actionable for governments. We do this by building product features that optimally support processing and reporting workflows by government staff, assisted by natural language processing. The goal: providing maximum citizen impact. The small, cross-functional squad consists of a designer, a front-end engineer, a full-stack engineer and an NLP engineer, guided by a product manager. As the tech lead, you’re not only contributing code yourself, but you're also enabling your squad colleagues to contribute more effectively.

Your responsibilities will include:

• Taking responsibility for the week to week planning of the squad, in close collaboration with your engineering colleagues and product manager.
• Guiding the squad through technical specifications and decomposition of tasks.
• Giving feedback to the designer and product manager on feasibility and effort.
• Follow up feature progress and report to the product manager and CTO.
• Identifying blockers and issues early on and work together with your colleagues to prevent them.
• You actively contribute code to the back-end, and wherever you’re confident.

At CitizenLab, we work in small teams where members collectively take ownership of the outcome of the features they build. We work in very small iterations and release continuously. We’re strong believers in user testing and understanding live product usage.

Wie je bent

What do we expect from you?

• You have several years of experience in a technical leadership position.
• You have dealt with end-to-end complexities of web applications that apply machine learning before as a developer, from the AI models, through the back-end APIs, to the UI.
• You know Ruby well and have contributed full-stack to user-facing web applications.
• You understand the fundamentals of machine learning and have toyed around with Python.
• Experience with React and Typescript is a plus.
• You are a facilitator more than a decision-maker and believe the collaborative knowledge in the team exceeds the individuals'.
• You are a great listener and communicator.
• You are located near, or willing to relocate to Brussels in better times.

Eagerness to learn, talent, and enthusiasm are more important than ticking the boxes though. Even if not all desired requirements are met, but you're very excited about the role, we want to hear from you.

Wat we bieden

What can you expect from us?

• Unlock your full potential and have a social impact at scale. We're daily working with +230 governments to connect them to their citizens.
• Become a key factor in our rapid transition from startup to a scaleup (50 employees).
• Work in a fast-paced, collaborative and supportive environment. We share a participatory culture of autonomy and ownership by everyone, not only by the leadership.
• Be part of our dynamic, international team. We organise many team activities and afterworks (whenpossible). We are as serious about our work in digital democracy, as about having fun on our journey together.
• Informal work vibe with open communication and full transparency on results.
• Participate in inspiring team lunches, our company book club, bi-quarterly strategic town halls, bi-yearly off-site team retreats.
• Work 10% of your time on personal projects and self-development for the long run. We’re growing fast together, both collectively and individually.
• Receive a competitive salary package, incl. perks such as 26 paid holidays, training budget, well-being budget, collective bonus plan, your own laptop, full flexibility on working from home, and much more.