Top 3 Take-Aways

• Location Services is a $60bn market. Hospitals, Corporate Offices, and Manufacturing plants need indoor location data to save costs and create new revenue streams. Kontakt.io is disrupting this space by simplifying the use of technology. 

• Kontakt.io’s global 50-person team has a validated go-to-market plan with 100s of customers and multi-million Dollar license agreements in place

• Kontakt.io is looking for a Chief Software Engineer who can lead all aspects of software engineering, data science, and product development. The ideal candidate is extremely ambitious, gifted, and has the energy to lead and scale a remote team from 10 to 50 engineers in the next 3 years to come.

The Job Summary

• You are joining as a captain to a pirate ship - it’s going to be tough, fun and very rewarding!
• You will lead all aspects of cloud scaling (Kafka, Cassandra) software development and engineering
• You will hyper scale the existing infrastructure while hacking & building new products and features at hackathon speed 
• You will lead a remote team of 10+ engineers and scaling it to 50 over the next 36 months
• You will be the 2nd US-based engineer setting the foundation for our US product and engineering practice
• You will scale the Cloud architecture from 2M to 100M connected IoT devices
• You will gain VC-backed scale-up experience in building products and teams
• You will receive a competitive compensation including base, bonus, and a 1%+ equity package

About Kontakt.io Inc.

Kontakt.io Inc. is an industry leader in indoor location services and BLE beacons. We help businesses create revenues and save costs with indoor location and sensor data. Our mission is to better connect people, locations, and things to create meaningful insight, safer workplaces, and lessen waste. Our ambition is to become the global indoor location standard. 

We empower vertical business applications, with open standard APIs and AI-driven event streams to help enterprises accelerate through digital transformation. To our location-aware technology partners, we offer fleet management software, location and condition services, beacons, and gateways to help them focus on core innovation, reducing time to market and costs. Customers choose to work with us over others because we deliver the industry’s fastest time-to-value, the lowest TCO, the most scalable tech stack, and unlimited innovation by being 100% hardware agnostic and enabling 1,000s of applications.

Today, we serve over 1,000 partners and customers across diverse sizes and industries, from transportation and logistics to manufacturing, healthcare, airports, governments, and corporate real estate. We strive to delight people and make a real difference in the world wherever possible by providing an enterprise-tailored software solution scaled to the internet. We are a 50+ people strong organization funded with USD $10M by Heartcore Capital and Credo Ventures and profitably growing 100%+ YoY. We operate out of San Francisco, New York, Krakow, and Berlin.

In the next years to come, we are radically transforming the Indoor Location landscape while taking the company to 100M in revenues.

The Job

You will lead all software engineering and efforts. You will scale the Kontakt.io Cloud from $10M to $100M in revenues. You will build new hardware-agnostic Cloud products from scratch. You will build the indoor location IoT standard of the future. 

The Kontakt.io Cloud is a data-intensive streaming system (location, camera, and sensor data using Bluetooth, Wifi, and Infrared) based on Kafka, Cassandra, MongoDB, and Postgres. Integration technologies include RESTful APIs, WSS Streams, and Webhooks. On the user-facing side, we use vue.js.

Your Experience

• You have successfully built and scaled an enterprise SaaS-Cloud product as a full-stack developer from the ground up
• Leading small, remote, start-up style engineering teams to deliver business outcomes, products, and features against aggressive timelines
• Working closely with customers, products, and sales
• Leading teams in planning, estimation, prioritization, trade-offs, balancing technical debt, and meeting product delivery milestones.
• Seeing sh*t hitting the fan in production environments with enterprise customers - finding and successfully deploying workarounds in 48h 
• Expertise in high-level programming like Java and JEE internals (Classloading, Memory Management, Transaction management) and extensive background in databases
• Hands-on experience in designing and developing highly scalable enterprise applications using modern technology stacks with Kafka, Cassandra, MongoDB
• Driving Cloud migration and strategy, experience with DevOps frameworks (AWS, Docker, Kubernetes)
• Working for VC-funded startups before

Personality Requirements

• You are a hacker
• You enjoy technical challenges and suggesting unorthodox solutions
• You enjoy the ride, facing unforeseen challenges, beating the odds. 
• You want to create a legacy 
• You demonstrate outstanding leadership and agility when dealing with uncertainty 

Duties

• Launch new subscription products as part of the Kontakt.io Cloud offering 
• Build a remote-first engineering dream-team 
• Drive all technical aspects of product development
• Guide the organization to incorporate architecture design patterns, system best practices, and standards in architecture, security, and infrastructure.
• Work with C-level leadership to form a detailed technical strategy and development road map
• Communicate and document via presentations, reports, and diagrams the technical strategy
• Ensure a strong process and practice is followed for coding standards, conducting code reviews, performance optimization, run-time monitoring, and architectural reviews/stage-gates
• Lead and support talent management and continuous development of direct and functional reports and teams for high-performance by providing feedback, coaching, and mentoring to senior engineers
• Execute Go-To-Market Strategy against set deadlines and requirements
• Ensure our product and systems readiness for scale

Compensation

• Competitive base salary: $180k - Annual bonus: up to $50k 
• ESOP: 0.5-1%

Kontakt.io Virtues and Culture

Lead customer-centric - customer leadership. If a customer has a problem we don’t wait. We understand what customer needs and we tailor our services, products around the customer. It doesn’t mean that we let the customer lead us. It means that we think about the customer first.

Have a growth mindset - we commit to results and growth. We are responsible for results, not for the activity or time spent. If we believe we can’t achieve a result or a job, it’s our duty to raise the voice, push back, explain what we suggest instead. We don’t see results as something static - ever. This means that our results and expectations are becoming more ambitious, quarter over quarter. We constantly evolve

Challenge, inspire, respect - we are the challenger in the marketplace. When working with each other - or with customers - we enjoy and desire to challenge each other. We listen, reflect, and respond. We aim to understand the point of view of the other party and if there is customer merit in the argument. When we challenge, we articulate our hypothesis clearly and provide data and evidence in our argumentation. We respect the time of our colleagues. We have a zero-tolerance towards discrimination of any kind. We respect the environment.

Execute systematically - We recognize that the start-up journey will only be successful if we learn twice as much as others in half the time. For us, innovation also means continuous improvement in all fields. We think in systems when driving results, growth, and learnings.

Act with urgency - We have a sense of urgency in everything we do - at all times. It’s deeply rooted in the belief that as an up-start, as a challenger, we need to drive value for our customers faster and better than anybody else in the marketplace. We do things outside of the personal comfort zone.

The Team

Philipp von Gilsa: CEO & Founder- New York City / San Francisco

Rom Eizenberg: CRO & Product Guru - New York City

Lukasz Szelejewski: CTO & Hardware Ninja - Krakow, Poland

Lukasz Gargasz: COO & Process Master - Krakow, Poland

Tomek Stasierski: Head of Ops & Kaizen Expert - Krakow, Poland