Accessibility Product Engineer

You probably haven’t run into a company like Olark before. We're a small, fully-remote, self-funded, people-first team who take pride in impacting our small corner of the world. As pioneers of modern live chat in 2009, we spent the last 12+ years making customer messaging attainable for all businesses.

We lead with our values, care about our teammates, and are committed to making business more human.  We also care deeply about accessibility and collaboration.  In 2021, we encoded that commitment to web accessibility by becoming a Public Benefit Corporation and baking it into our social impact goal. In 2022, we took that commitment even further, and became an established B-corp! 

This role can be based anywhere in the United States or Canada. 

What role will you play on our team?

We're looking for a Product Engineer to help us build and shape our next-generation customer collaboration platform, with a focus on accessibility. We're about a year in development in closed beta, so you're joining at the perfect time to exert a lot of influence and ownership in the product (and we hope you do!)

What will your day-to-day look like with us?

The people: You will be joining a small team of engineers, reporting to our Product Engineering Manager and working directly with the CTO and Head of Product. You'll get a chance to meet all of Olark during the interview process. Our CTO will be the first to interview you.

The work: We collaborate remotely over Trello, Slack, Zoom, and Google Docs. Our new product is built on the latest versions of React, Typescript, GraphQL, and Python. Your code will get in front of customers quickly with helpful code reviews, automated testing, and deployment.

What skills and responsibilities go with this role?

• Bring a passion for product development, demonstrated skill at building apps, and value honing your craft as an engineer. 
• Have enthusiasm and some experience with building for web accessibility. Ideally you have ideas for how we might build with an accessibility-first mindset starting at the design phase.
• Apply modern best practices in building our next generation product, as well as incremental improvements to our existing products like the chat widget used by millions of visitors across the web.
• Have experience in web development using TypeScript, React, and GraphQL. Bonus points for familiarity with Python or Google Cloud technologies like Firebase.
• Engage occasionally with customers to #practice empathy for their needs and use cases. 
• Collaborate across teams, including engineering, product, customer support and marketing. Participate in collaborative product design sessions, bringing designs and ideas, while keeping our customers in mind. 

What do we expect from you? 

• Have a high sense of ownership: We aim to be a Small Giant with a small team and focus for high impact. As an ideal teammate, you would take ownership of the work you do and be very intentional about your efforts and their connection to our vision. 
• You prioritize accessibility and inclusivity in your product work: You have experience building software with universal design in mind; from the UI code, to architecture, to tooling and testing, web accessibility takes center stage. Prior experience with inclusive software design is a big plus, but not required. You understand that the goal of web accessibility is not only passing requirements but also to provide the best possible user experience for all.
• Self-directed, but also collaborative: You are happy to work and make things happen independently, but know when to ask for help. You are comfortable giving, and receiving, candid feedback.  You are a team player who is open to contributing or leading, whichever the project requires.
• Empathetic: You realize listening is just as important as speaking your mind. You assume good faith with your teammates when there is conflict and are curious about understanding their perspectives. 
• Comfortable with working remotely and across time zones: We are entirely distributed and you’ll communicate via remote tools: email, Slack, Zoom, etc. Y
• Invested in what we are building: Commitment - to each other, to our purpose, fully invested in what we're building. Vision oriented opposed to goal oriented (big picture in mind)

What can you expect from us?

First off, make sure to read about our team culture at olark.com/jobs, and our values at olark.com/values. Beyond what you see there, you can expect:

• An inclusive remote culture and team: Even though we live all over the US and Canada, our team makes the effort to connect to one another personally. We provide in-person opportunities to further enhance that bond. We genuinely like each other :)
• A life outside of work: Olarkers generally work 40 hour weeks. Work is a marathon, not a sprint.  We are building a company for the long haul.  
• Great compensation and benefits: phone/internet stipend, health benefits, coworking stipends, $1K vacation bonus every year, 2K professional development budget, matching 401k, and charitable donation matching.

Olark is committed to diversity in its workforce. Olark is an equal employment opportunity employer and considers qualified applicants without regard to gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, age, race, veteran or disability status.

Olark is committed to accessibility in all aspects of our hiring process. If you require a reasonable accommodation to complete this application, interview, or any other portion of our selection process, please email accommodations@olark.com.