Import.io is on a mission to enable the world’s data. Effective use of data can provide incredible efficiency and value to almost any business, from the smallest independent company to the largest multinational.
Import.io delivers a SaaS platform that enables enterprises to convert the mass of data on public web sites into structured, high-quality machine-readable data at scale.
Reporting directly to the VP Product & Delivery, the Customer Success Engineer owns the technical delivery of website extractors to end customers. As a technical manager they are responsible for coordinating and facilitating the development work of external partners and quality assuring their output in line with project milestones.
We are looking for talented individuals with an obsessive attention to detail and an appetite for ownership who will train, guide and manage external teams of JavaScript developers to deliver solutions to meet our customers’ needs.
The Customer Success Engineer role
The Customer Success Engineers together form a team of 3-4 who collectively own all of the company’s deliveries to our customers. We are on-boarding new clients constantly—some very large with thousands of new extractors—and the Customer Success Engineers own the process from initial requirements gathering, scoping and estimation, through to the creation of custom content extractors and on to QA, deployment, testing and acceptance.
They are the customers’ primary point of contact for status updates and coordination with the customers’ own internal release schedule.
They own the customer relationship and work to the Statement of Work agreed at customer engagement. They coordinate the deliveries of external teams of 10-30 JS developers, ensuring that the delivered working products align to the project milestones and oversee the final acceptance by the customer.
A key part of this role is the management and oversight of the code development. The Customer Success Engineer has their own dedicated external team of developers, including one Senior JS Developer who is their primary external point of contact. They will also have access to a shared team of internal extractor delivery engineers.
The Customer Success Engineer is the most experienced and skilled technician in their team of JS developers. They will write the core reusable parts (the most technically-challenging and impactful components), perform coding reviews and provide training in best practices for extractor creation.
Key Customer Success Engineer Responsibilities
The Customer Success Engineer is an independent autonomous role which owns the delivery process from the beginning of clients needs analysis and requirements gathering through the internal production phases to customer acceptance. As such, the role is empowered in various important ways:
- To direct the hiring of suitably qualified JS engineers in our partners
- To own quality control and monitoring of delivered code
- To engage in active performance management and to deselect under-performing members from the external development team
- To adopt the leadership and project management approaches that best fit their personal style and get the best results
- To set the best practice standards and guides for their teams, while sharing insights with other Customer Success Engineers on other client projects
- To maintain and oversee large code repositories. To enforce the best practices, promoting modularization and reusability.
- To have direct access to the Core Engineering team and to determine whether issues arising from the development teams should be resolved within the Delivery team or escalated to the Core Engineering team
- To manage the deadlines and expectations with the client and to own all stakeholder management—internal and external—relating to the project
- To adopt any status reporting or internal metrics gathering process that reliably delivers quality results
Customer Success Engineer Requirements
This is a hands-on technical role with a component of coding in it. The Customer Success Engineer sets the quality standard for the team in terms of code quality, performance and efficiency.
As a management and leadership role, it also requires many soft-skills around clear customer communications, project management, negotiations with our external partners providers (the JS developers), dealing with sensitive client issues and the inevitable bumps in the road that large-scale delivery entails.
The scale we work in is huge. We gather data from 150 million unique web pages and serve a billion queries per month. A new client may have a requirement for thousands of new extractors, whose creation, testing and deployment is distributed between the team of Customer Success Engineers. It is a task of enormous coordination, so candidates from a background of managing projects of many fast-moving parts will be utilising their skills here.
Drawing upon their strong project and client management skills in facilitating software development work, they ensure quality standards are met and the projects are delivered according to commitments made, while also feeding back into the Delivery team best practices, shared insights and opportunities for Continuous Improvement.
It is a complex role requiring strong communication, attention to detail and grasp of fine technical details.
The background of the Engineer Manager reflects this wide set of responsibilities:
- Previous JavaScript development experience
- Strong data analysis and SQL skills
- Confident and clear communicator
- Client and relationship management
- Team leadership and project management
We provide a technically-challenging and professional atmosphere working on systems at large scale (i.e, over a hundred thousand servers). We’re looking for an individual excited to bring their talents to extending our capabilities and delivering high-quality solutions to our clients.