We start with the cliff notes about the position. If this appeals to you, continue reading for a longer text about working at Silverfin and your role 👇

Silverfin is a cutting-edge cloud software solution built by accountants, for accountants. Founded in 2013, Silverfin was created to solve the frustrations of manual, error-prone processes in analysing financial data and compliance. From day one, we’ve been a cloud-first platform with an open API architecture, leveraging structured data to transform how accountants work. Our mission is simple: to enhance and support the accountancy profession through AI and automation, ensuring accountants remain relevant and respected in the future of finance.

At Silverfin, we're an equal opportunity employer and value diversity at our company. Although we know we’re not perfect yet, we are working hard on it and always open for your feedback. In line with our vision to build a diverse, equitable and inclusive organisation, our policy is to only start the interview process once underrepresented groups are sufficiently represented in the list of candidates applying for the position. For this reason, it’s possible that interviews may be slightly delayed until we’ve reached that goal.

We're committed to elevating talent by creating an environment where we can all thrive together. So if you think you have what it takes, but don't necessarily check every single box, please consider applying. We'd love to hear how you might contribute to our mission and our team.

What can we offer you?

Actual, proper work-life balance
Flexible working hours and possibility to work 100% remotely
Experienced engineers as mentors Personal growth training and opportunities
A distributed remote-first engineering team with 40+ colleagues in 14 different countries on 2 continents
A refreshing work environment with professional, friendly and welcoming colleagues
A €1200 yearly budget for conferences, courses, workshops or other training opportunities that will improve your skills
Two engineering retreats per year, somewhere in Europe
Ten company-wide Wellbeing Days per year for all employees (once a month, except in July and August)

Compensation

For this role, the compensation range is €92,000 - €125,000 a year, which reflects the total compensation band for engineers at this level.
Please note: Most candidates start at the lower to mid part of the range, depending on experience and how their profile compares to our existing team. The higher end of the range is typically offered to individuals with a track record of strong impact and deep expertise in similar roles. We run annual compensation reviews, so there is clear opportunity for growth as you progress in the role.

What will you work on?

A production SaaS application used by thousands of customers on a global scale
Figuring out the best ways to solve a customer or business problem in close collaboration with a product manager, a product designer and other engineers
User facing functionalities
Maintenance, support and bug fixes of existing functionality

What are we looking for?

You’re experienced in Ruby on Rails
You have some experience using Javascript framework(s), understand the value of them, but also know when plain Javascript is enough.
You're interested in getting to know our customers to find the best solution for a given challenge.
You code with reason and can justify the important decisions you made during development.
You can communicate clearly in English, both in writing and verbally.
You know and can apply best practices when relevant. That means the daily tools of the trade like version control, testing, and refactoring; but also higher level concepts such as good object oriented design.
You're aware of the trade-offs involved in proper engineering and can make balanced business decisions, keeping in mind all the stakeholders of the project.
You are willing and able to travel to Belgium 3 times a year, for our engineering retreats as well as our company Kick-Off

What’s a Silverfin?

At Silverfin we’re trying to apply the promise of software to the age-old industry of accounting. With our SaaS we’re automating a large chunk of the busy-work that accountants are currently handling manually, and are building new tools so they can provide better services to their customers. We aim to optimise their workflow in such a way that accountants can spend more time on the much more impactful and rewarding work of advising their customers, the business owners.

The good news is we’re succeeding in doing exactly that. Today, Silverfin is trusted by over 930 accountancy offices across 16 countries. Our clients include all of the Big 4 accounting firms, as well as leading global networks like BDO, PKF, Baker Tilly, Grant Thornton, and Moore. Every week more than 15,000 financial service professionals use Silverfin to help and advise more than 400,000 businesses. Our customers adore us! The even better news is there’s still plenty left to work on, and that’s where we hope you come in.

Since November 2023 we are proudly part of Visma - the European leader in mission-critical cloud software, enjoying the power of the Visma brand and resources whilst retaining business autonomy and go-to-market freedom.

What does working at Silverfin look like?

The Silverfin engineering department consists of seven independent engineering teams. Each team specialises in a part of the Silverfin domain. We are big believers in the effectiveness of autonomous, cross-functional teams who conduct problem discovery before choosing a solution. All of our teams have dedicated product managers and most of them have dedicated product designers as well.

Cross-cutting technical concerns are handled by our two guilds. They consist of members from different teams and work on topics like strategy and architecture, as well as anything related to frontend technologies.

Our ops team ensures that things run smoothly, everything scales across our stacks and regions, and will work with you should issues arise. They built our infrastructure to allow for a very high level of developer comfort. Stagings are readily available for every branch, and deployments are safe and dead simple. We’re enthusiastic followers of the devops mindset, which means ops and developers work together to solve problems and empower each-other to be self-sufficient, instead of throwing problems over the wall to the “other side”.

We run an up-to-date Rails monolith on the backend, with PostgreSQL and Redis for persistence and caching. For specific needs like AI models and virus scanning we added a couple of satellite services. Everything runs on a Kubernetes cluster in Google Cloud. Our daily tools include GitLab, Quip and Slack, with Google Meet as our remote conferencing tool of choice.

No code gets deployed without a code review by a peer, and testing is a must. Our pipeline automates deployment when the suite is green, with deploys happening dozens of times a day. Each team is currently doing Kanban, but they’re free to follow whatever process suits them best. There are regular retros held to work towards continuous improvement.

Software for accountants is not considered to be very exciting, but we have our fair share of technical challenges. To give you a sense of scale: one of our databases exceeds 10TB*, and our largest table has crossed the 10 billion row mark a long while back. We interface with more than 30 different external APIs, and provide third parties APIs of our own.

*: Our ops team noted that this actually isn’t that hard to achieve if you’re just indexing everything, but it still sounds impressive, right?

What makes the engineering team at Silverfin special?

We’re a remote-first engineering team of 40+ people distributed in 14 different countries over two continents. A priority for us is maintaining proper work-life balance. We avoid meetings as much as possible, accept deadlines only when absolutely necessary, and never expect anyone to work longer hours than they’ve signed up for. A day in our working lives is pretty boring, and we feel that’s exactly how it should be.

Working with us means you can be flexible with your schedule. It’s OK to disappear for a few hours in the middle of the day to run some errands, get a haircut, pick up the kids - whatever reason, you don’t need to explain yourself. You also fully decide when you take time off: our team is sufficiently varied and well organised that there are always enough people around to handle the load, and in the rare cases it’s not, we will decrease the load instead of asking people to move their holiday.

Being remote-first means we favour asynchronous communication. We don’t shy away from chatting in Slack, but the important decisions or discussions are done in Gitlab issues, over email, or in Quip, so there’s a written, persisted record. We’re mindful of maintaining long chunks of focussed time, which means we avoid @-mentions or PMs on Slack, and other triggers and interrupts. We encourage using Slack’s DnD function, especially when you’re not working!

We’d be really happy to welcome you in our #engineering channel, but it’s not just virtual: we make sure we regularly get to see each other in real life too. Twice a year we fly the whole engineering team together to a different location in Europe, and at least once a year we join up with the rest of the company so we can spend some time together with the other departments.

What does your future look like?

Personal growth is key to staying motivated. Our team of experienced engineers is there to mentor you and help you hone your craft and improve as an engineer. You will have a chance to get to know and work with a state-of-the-art software development workflow on a real life Rails app at a large scale.

It's also good to know that later on at Silverfin you don’t need to move to management in order to advance. We see the individual contributor track and the management track as two different growth paths which every engineer can follow and switch between. You can be promoted, including pay raises, as a contributor or as a manager.

Everyone gets a €1200 yearly budget to spend on conferences, courses, workshops or other training to improve their skills and level up. This also includes accommodation and travel costs. If the conference is on a workday you’ll get paid like any normal day.

Requirements

- You have at least 2 years of experience working with Ruby, or 1 year of experience with Ruby and 3 years in one or more other programming languages

- You have some experience using Javascript framework(s)

- Your work hours have some overlap with EU business hours (we require your local timezone to be within CET +/- 3h)

- You can communicate clearly in English, both in writing and verbally

- You are willing and able to travel to Belgium 3 times a year, for our engineering retreats as well as our company Kick-Off

Nice to haves

These would be nice but are definitely not necessary. Don’t worry if none of the following applies to you.

-Experience as a remote worker in a fully remote team

-Experience working with large datasets and the problems they bring

-Experience in Fintech

-Accounting knowledge

Interested?

You can apply today and we’ll start having interviews from 02/09. There’s no benefit to applying early, so you can take your time answering the application questions.

Read about what our interviewing process looks like or email us with any questions on zoe.deswaef@silverfin.com