Head of Engineering

Core responsibilities of the role
Owner, advocate, and architect of quality, ensuring the stability and resilience of the Chronicle product.

You will be responsible for three key areas:

Product Delivery

1. Actively contribute to core product development and infrastructure.
2. Support sprint planning, backlog grooming, and technical discussions.
3. Own the release process (dev → staging → prod) for smooth, stable deployments.
4. Unblock the team by resolving technical challenges or filling gaps.
5. Collaborate with Mayuresh and Claire on release strategy, prioritization, and scoping.

Engineering Operations

1. Ensure reliability and uptime with improved monitoring and incident response.
2. Optimize infrastructure and CI/CD pipelines for scalability and efficiency.
3. Establish security and compliance practices for future growth.
4. Lead postmortems, technical reviews, and infrastructure upgrades.
5. Drive cross-team projects like DevOps initiatives and infra scaling.
6. Improve code reviews, testing, and release workflows.
7. Collaborate with QA to enhance product quality and resilience.
8. Raise engineering standards in code quality, documentation, and communication.

Engineering Leadership & Alignment

• Champion Quality: Advocate best practices and uphold Chronicle’s quality standards.
• Define & Document: Establish initial requirements and test cases for new features.
• Collaborate & Solve: Partner with Product to prioritize and resolve issues.
• End-to-End Testing: Ensure comprehensive testing across the Chronicle experience.

What do the next 3-6-12 months look like?
As a member of the founding team, you will be working towards a public launch of the product that is planned for November 2024. Leading up to this milestone, below are the key things you will work on →

First few weeks

1. You will work closely with Pavan, Mayuresh and Claire to get up to speed on all things Chronicle
2. Meet and pair with everyone in the team — Harris, Praveen, Anik, Ryan, Tinika, Tejas
3. Experience the product, get a deeper understanding of the codebase
4. Take on a feature, work with the team to and deliver a small meaningful feature end to end, get your hands dirty and gain traction
5. Be a part of our sprint planning & review, quality process, and start taking ownership of some tickets as you navigate through Chronicle’s codebase and understand the overall architecture

3 months

1. Over the first three months you will be mainly focussed on managing engineering operations and ensuring that we are delivering on high quality
2. Over 3 months the team will be committed to simplifying the exisiting product, improving the existing widgets, introducing a better onboarding and creation experience as well as new and improved AI features.
3. You will also work on improving the product performance, latency and ensuring that the product is bug free as we gear up for launching to more users

6 months

1. Over 6 months the core focus will be getting the product ready for a public launch. This will includes building hygiene features (export, self serve onboarding, feature flagging for free and paid plans)
2. Most importantly we will all be working together as a team - gearing up for launch. All hands on deck to make our launch successful and to ensure that our existing users are loving the product. Everyone is expected to be a part of this exciting journey.

12 month priorities

Work on with the wider team on maintaining the product and taking on newer bigger pieces of product build to address key user problems. We will continue to become sharper in our focus on use cases and users over this year. So the product is expected to increase in depth across various use cases.

Below is the current make up of our engineering team →

Chris Jerochim - Head of Engineering (Leaving in Feb)

Chris leads engineering at Chronicle works closely with business, product, and design teams to shape the roadmap and strategy for the Chronicle product's market launch. He plays a key role in aligning and guiding the engineering team, providing mentorship and ensuring a cohesive approach to the product development. Chris is a champion for craft and often adds the finishing touches - much like a Chef plates their signature dishes.

Pavan Tirumani - Tech Lead Pavan is our first engineer. His wealth of experience includes diverse projects, like building an OS framework for running web applications on automotive, a plug and play AppStore from scratch, and a simple android app for searching and organising screenshots (a must-have in today’s digital world). He handles everything backend related at Chronicle. Pavan makes Chronicle robust and dependable.

Harris Jose (Lead Full stack) Praveen Kumar (Frontend) Anik Das (Frontend) Ryan Potter (Frontend)

• Our strengths and gaps
  
  Strengths
  
  
1. Domain knowledge: Strong understanding of creating presentation tools, having built and launched 3 closed beta versions to actual users
2. Strong foundations and experience: We have now built a really strong foundation so we can continue launching features on top
3. Deep focused implementation: Ability to deep dive into a problem to resolve functional issues
4. Engagement & growth: The team are willing to experiment, learn and grow their technical and delivery skills.
• Gaps
  
  
1. Potential blindspots in terms of security, performance, reliability as we scale the product to go to general access — need someone with experience of having done this before
2. Guided implementation: Needs guidance to maintain quality, especially with unfamiliar problems

What are we looking for?

• Must haves
1. 10+ years of engineering experience: Proven expertise in designing, building, and scaling backend systems, with experience launching robust and performant products.
2. Experience with leading an engineering team and having built and launched a product publicly
3. Passion for craft: Obsession with delivering high-quality, maintainable code and scalable systems with attention to detail.
4. System design excellence: Deep understanding of distributed systems, microservices architecture, and database design for high-scale applications.
5. First-principles problem solving: Ability to deeply analyze complex technical problems, craft elegant, scalable solutions, and take ownership from concept to execution.
6. Performance and reliability: Expertise in optimizing backend performance, ensuring reliability, and implementing effective monitoring and incident response strategies.
7. Infrastructure and DevOps: Strong experience in building scalable infrastructure, improving CI/CD pipelines, and implementing infrastructure as code.
8. Security and compliance: Solid knowledge of implementing secure systems and processes that support regulatory compliance for growing organizations.
9. Adaptability: Comfortable with learning new tools, frameworks, and technologies to select the best solution for each problem.
• Good to have
1. Atleast 1-2 years in a top tier, marquee company - especially early in the career
2. Experience in building creation tools (similar to Notion, Figma, Canva, Atlassian)
3. A good portfolio of open source contributions
4. Have experience building Real Time Collaboration (RTC) in a digital product
5. Have strong inclinations towards certain stacks/languages but are not ideologically tied to specific technologies; naturally curious and willing to take a step to learn something you don’t have experience in
• Culture
1. Proactive in taking ownership and initiative
2. Take pride in their work and craft
3. We are looking for a problem solver not a problem pointer
4. Founding member mindset to participate in tasks outside of their core area and build the company as their own
5. Collaborative - peers should have a stellar feedback of working with them
6. Opinionated - should bring their views with conviction to the table
7. Clear proactive communications
8. Comfortable in ambiguity, able to structure and work through unclear starting points
9. Pragmatic, practical when it comes to taking decisions or prioritising work

• Past experiences that we value
1. Creator tools (Social media, Presentation software is a plus)
2. Productivity tools
3. Design / Product / UX background
4. Early stage product experience
5. Product design agencies
• Anti-experiences
1. Enterprises only experience (e.g. CBA, Woolies, etc.)
2. Only 6-12 month stints
3. We are not looking for cowboys/girls → no contractors, dev shops, freelancers
4. We are not looking for heroes/mavericks → need experience working with a team

About us
Chronicle is a presentation format for modern teams. We are changing the way people craft and tell compelling stories every day. Chronicle will enable teams to communicate, capture thoughts, ideas and decisions without spending hours designing slides. Chronicle is not trying to make presentation software that makes slides better or faster, but rather trying to reimagine the format completely.

Remember the last time you were making a presentation and it took hours? We are solving a problem that has plagued workplaces since the '80s: presentations! We are asking the question - what would be the ideal format of communication in context of 2023 if slides didn't exist?