Talarian is a growing and profitable software company that is building the future of spreadsheet-driven business applications. The latest product is GPT for Work, enabling people to use ChatGPT directly from Excel and Google Sheets, Docs. It has gone viral, being installed by more than 2 million people since its launch in early January. The greatest hits include YAMM (Yet Another Mail Merge), Awesome Table and Form Publisher. They are used and loved by millions and some of the most popular products in the Google Workspace marketplace.
Around 40 people all over the world are working for Talarian, with a main office in the center of Paris. People are based in Europe, Asia, Africa and North America, all highly motivated and dedicated.
Talarian is a transparent organization. Important metrics and numbers are communicated to all team members. Decisions are discussed collaboratively, not behind closed doors. If you value being part of the discussions on how to shape the future of the product, by giving your input, weighing in and being heard, then you might just be happy to work here!
The product's values are: simplicity, empowerment, and getting out of the way.
Why you should work at Talarian?
- LLMs are the most revolutionary new tech in decades. It is a very deep and wide technology that allows to build completely new capabilities into software. However, this technology also brings new challenges that, if addressed correctly in the products, gives an edge over competitors:
- non-deterministic generative outputs that make testing very hard
- long response times, which users are not used to when interacting with software
- high marginal costs which vary greatly from use-case to use-case and is unusual for software
- products are directly built within Microsoft Excel, Google Sheets and Google Docs. Building into such powerful interfaces is both very rewarding and very difficult
- everything Talarian do is in the cloud: GCP and Azure
- products have very large user-bases (millions): market is global!
- users love the products and have very high expectations
The role
Talarian is hiring a VP Engineering with a strong operations and people focus. The main responsibilities will be to:
- lead the engineering team
- ensure that production runs smoothly
- own the planning, build and release process to make sure that everything is shipped on time.
The VP of Engineering will report to the CEO and work closely with the CTO.
Your responsibilities
- Lead the engineering team. Ensure people are able to do their best work, in a good atmosphere, and form a cohesive team. Make them excited about what Talarian is building and building it right. Make them grow. Own staffing and capacity planning. Contribute to and execute the roadmap.
- Drive and own the development and release planning to make sure release happens on time. This means preempting and warning about delays, whatever their cause, ensuring everythingâs ready on time for a new release, and communicating continuously over how the planning is evolving.
- Implement or improve testing, QA and release processes to make them as robust and automated (where it makes sense) as possible. That means modernizing our continuous deployment pipelines, environments infrastructure, provisioning infrastructure, etc
- Keep the lights on. Thatâs the most important part. Thanks to the amazing infrastructure provided by Google, they rarely go off, but having so many users, every interruption that happens is extremely painful. This means planning for the worst, thinking about risks, monitoring the obsolescence, maintenance and fit with our evolving scale of the various pieces of our infrastructure.
- Own the downtime process. Jump on a production issue, whatever the time and day, and donât quit the frontline until itâs solved. Ensure support and sales channels are maintained up to speed on the details and what to communicate to customers. Write the postmortem and implement remediation actions.
- Prepare and execute major migrations.
The stack
Applications are built with:
- React,
- Typescript,
- Google Apps Script,
- Firebase,
- Node JS,
- Java,
- PostgreSQL,
- Playwright,
- Selenium.
Everything is on Google Cloud Platform and Vercel.
And Talarian also uses Github, Jira, SonarCloud, Sentry and Lambdatest.
You
You don't recognize yourself 100% in the criteria below? Send us your CV anyway! Your passion, curiosity and motivation will help us to help you grow đ 
.
- Youâre a leader and a people person. People feel good around you and respect you.
- You have managed a team of at least 20 people.
- Youâre not âjust a coach or a consultantâ, you lead.
- You discuss and communicate well on what your team should do, does and will do.
- You donât blame the intern who dropped the database, you make it impossible that it happens in the first place.
- You care very deeply about keeping the lights on, and will take full responsibility for any service interruption.
- You get to the bottom of things.
- You really like organizing things and ârunning themâ. We want to hire someone that will teach us how to work.
- You are extremely time- and detail-oriented.
- You have 5+ years of experience as a software engineer, and 5+ years as an engineering management position, preferably for large-scale software products.
- You have a good knowledge of various architectures and distributed systems.
- You are highly proficient with spreadsheets, Github, Jira and other typical software engineering tools.
- You are fluent in English and French.
- You enjoy writing, you care about words and grammar, you are sharp and thorough.
- You are ability to build effective relationships with colleagues across organizations and functional groups.
- You are organized, able to manage multiple large projects at the same time, and know how to report progress in a clear and interesting way
... and what can make a little difference? That you already used or tried to reverse engineered one of our products!
The package
Around 120 kâŹ
The little extras
- Office in the center of Paris and possible to work remotely some days
- Personalised onboarding
- Stock options
Want to know more? Let's have a call https://www.a-player.co/talarian-vp-call !