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success_eng.md

Customer Success Engineer

What's Parse.ly?

We've built a real-time content measurement layer for the entire web.

Our analytics platform helps digital storytellers at some of the web's best sites, such as Arstechnica, The New Yorker, TechCrunch, The Intercept, and many more. In total, our analytics system needs to handle over 100 billion monthly events from over 1 billion monthly unique visitors.

Our entire stack is in Python and JavaScript, and our team has innovated in areas related to real-time analytics, building some of the best open source tools for working with modern stream processing technologies. Our UX/design team has also built one of the best-looking dashboards on the planet, using AngularJS and d3.js. You can see some screenshots: http://parse.ly/tour

Our distributed team is best-in-class and we happily skip commutes by working out of our ergonomic home offices. Here's a photograph of mine running two full-screen Parse.ly dashboards on my monitors: https://flic.kr/p/v1NZ73

To see an example of how we work, check out the blog post, Whatever It Takes: http://blog.parsely.com/post/46

What's a Customer Success Engineer?

Code + Communication = Customer Success.

The goal of a Customer Success Engineer: ensure our customers are delighted with our products, through the wise application of technical know-how, engineering magic, and strong communication skills.

You need to love to help people, to write, to solve problems, and to build things. You need to be technical enough to gain deep experience in analytics -- not just our tools, but the tools available in the marketplace, too. You need to stay close to our customers and understand how they use our dashboard, APIs, and infrastructure, as well as how it fits into their broader analytics goals.

You have to love the idea of explaining tough technical concepts to a non-technical crowd. You want to use your people skills to work closely with top media companies to solve huge problems for them, but also sharpen your technical skills by staying embedded in the product team.

As this is a customer-facing role, you’ll also need to be comfortable jumping onto email threads, chat conversations, and even phone/video discussions with customers to help them diagnose issues. Sometimes, the people you’re talking to will be the web developers responsible for integrating Parse.ly into their sites and apps -- but sometimes, it will be non-technical staff who work with those people.

As for you, to match well to this role, you’re likely on the junior side of your programming career, so you may not be ready yet for doing day-to-day development on a complex product on your own. But you are willing to learn -- and you're ready to solve specific challenges for customers by building and shipping real code that they will use.

A day in the life of a Customer Success Engineer

In interacting with customers, you’re likely to help customers integrate open source content management systems (such as Wordpress, Drupal); SQL data warehouses (such as Redshift, BigQuery); video player plug-ins (such as JWPlayer, VideoJS); and iOS/Android mobile SDKs. Toward this end, you will become an expert in Parse.ly APIs for JavaScript, HTTP/JSON, data warehousing, and mobile toward this purpose. You'll also pick up Python programming by working with our team -- which is staffed with Python experts.

Finally, you'd be joining a team of talented engineers that love open source and tough data challenges, while also joining a team of talented analysts who like solving problems for customers every day.

You care deeply about our users and partners, and you will judge yourself on how well you serve them.

Responsibilities:

  • Develop deep expertise in the code base and functionality of the Parse.ly platform, including our Dashboard product, JavaScript libraries, mobile integrations, browser plug-ins, rich HTTP/JSON API, or emerging products like our Data Pipeline and our advanced Video Analytics.

  • Help users debug and diagnose integration challenges, and respond to their issues directly via web, email, and via phone/video discussion.

  • Lead our "bug day" process, where we triage customer issues and ensure the product team is well-informed in how to reproduce and fix those issues at the core.

  • Help Parse.ly with in-house Business Intelligence; we "dog food" our own products, and we use our own data to inform further developments (yes, this is very meta!) -- in this part of the role, you can use skills in data analysis and SQL to help with user engagement analysis, churn prediction, and automated customer onboarding.

  • Help to automate our QA process by building test scripts using Python- and JavaScript-based tools.

  • Take our tooling to the next level by extending in-house chatbots, administrative dashboards, and reusable scripts.

  • Work closely with the product team and success team to improve usage across our entire platform.

  • People with past experience working remotely will be prioritized.

Apply

Apply now by sending your CV and/or LinkedIn profile, Github link (or similar, if available), and 1-3 paragraph intro to work@parsely.com. Let us know what part of the position interests you, or point us toward an interesting project or piece of code you wrote. Also: mention the "Success Engineer" role.

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