Sr. Client Services Engineer

Poll Everywhere is looking for a Sr. Client Services Engineer to be the liaison between our Product Engineering and Customer Success teams. In this role, you will work autonomously and in collaboration with these teams to diagnose and resolve technical issues, provide guidance to customers, and collaborate with team members to ensure that our high-value accounts have everything they need to get the most out of Poll Everywhere at their organization.

We are excited to also be hiring for a Client Services Engineer (CSE) that will join this role and a program that’s central to our company strategy. This is a role we’re investing heavily in this year. You’ll have direct access to the CTO as your manager and the Director of Customer Success to prioritize and plan work. Accounts managed by our Customer Success Team have strong recurring use cases with Poll Everywhere. The largest hurdle for them to expand their usage is account administration at scale. This is where your role comes in! You will bring your expertise to build tools and integrate with standards like SAML SSO, SCIM, and LTI to enable this growth.

Engineering at Poll Everywhere is highly collaborative in nature. You can expect to work cross-functionally with Customer Success Managers to understand an account’s use case, with Product Managers on how your projects fit into the broader product strategy, with Designers on usability, accessibility, and aesthetics, and to maintain a high bar for quality with our QA team.

At Poll Everywhere we’re serious about helping our people meet their career goals. We have a long history of seeking out growth opportunities aligned with individual interests and promote internally often. Whether it's leading a project, establishing an elegant pattern to solve a common problem, or refining an interface so users can get their work done more quickly and enjoyably, we work hard to find the right match for each person. Poll Everywhere has an excellent track record of being a place to deepen your product development and engineering skills.

Poll Everywhere is looking forward at a refreshed mission to make presentations more inclusive. We believe that having our product in use at more of the 17 billion meetings a year in the F1000 would change those organizations through the inclusion of more voices. Our platform enables presenters to create interactive questions, word clouds, discussions, and competitions that their audience can respond to using any device. Founded in 2008, we now support millions of users worldwide from educational institutions to household companies such as Google, AT&T, and Target.

Objectives of the role

• Be a dedicated full stack engineer supporting our Customer Success team in order to provide guidance on technical requirements for integration projects all while owning the architecture of our systems to ensure any challenges blocking progress are addressed.
• Make sure our managed accounts & their technical teams (IT departments) get the most out of Poll Everywhere by simplifying license seat administration with standards and tools like SAML SSO to improve security and simplify authentication, WorkOS (implementing SCIM) to adapt to changing organizational membership of our customers and LTI to assess learning outcomes.
• Actively participate in customer calls and gather technical requirements, propose solutions & work with our larger engineering team to ensure alignment with our solution
• Abstract common tasks into scalable, user-friendly systems for our staff
• Refine technical estimation skills as you learn about our business. Commit to delivery timelines and meet those commitments
• Document technical solutions you build
• Deliver effective solutions to both internal staff and to unblock account expansion so our customers can get the most out of Poll Everywhere.

Daily & monthly responsibilities

• Implement integrations for our managed accounts: Single Sign On to be able to have users be able to authenticate with Poll Everywhere using systems already in place at their organizations. Learning Tools Interoperability (LTI) for exporting Poll Everywhere responses to tools used for grading and assessment in Higher Education. System for Cross-domain Identity Management (SCIM) for provisioning users and syncing user directories.
• Build relationships with your Customer Success Manager peers to develop features, workflows, and automation, and complete bulk tasks to help their managed accounts use Poll Everywhere more successfully. We primarily work in Ruby on Rails, HTML, CSS, and JavaScript to complete workflows like Single-Sign-On authentication.
• Estimate the technical complexity and time to complete features, data migrations, or ad-hoc tasks. You’ll have direct access to the CTO as your manager and the Director of Customer Success in order to plan and prioritize work.
• Diagnose and fix issues that prevent our most valuable accounts from getting the most out of Poll Everywhere. Common issues include merging multiple smaller accounts, splitting up large accounts, and working with the IT staff of these companies to set up Single Sign-On (SSO) for authentication.

Quarterly responsibilities

• Contribute to the Customer Success team’s feature prioritization discussion by bringing in data and insights from account trends and customer requests in order to provide technical estimates of the work involved for each.
• Look across one-off solutions and consolidate them into systems (roughly every 3 months) to keep the quality of code high, to allow us to maintain consistent velocity, and to proactively manage technical maintenance.
• Participate in on-call rotation

Skills you need to be successful in the role

• 3 – 5 years of experience using a web application framework like Ruby on Rails, Phoenix, Express, or Django.
• 3+ years of experience working in a customer-facing role translating technical requirements into implementations while working alongside a customer-facing team or internal stakeholders and departments.
• Strong understanding of HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and server-side language. We use Ruby.
• Comfortable taking on new challenges, and working with new APIs and protocols without prior experience.
• Differentiate the need to create a temporary customer solution and the need to develop and maintain a systemized solution. Plan, advocate for, and execute systematized solutions in cases when they would reduce toil of repeated tasks.
• Ability to prioritize requests and deliver solutions in a high-quality and efficient manner
• A creative and problem-solving mindset, comfortable working with customers, partners, and the Poll Everywhere Engineering team to develop new products and solutions

Nice to have's

• Atomic CSS frameworks like Tailwind CSS for consistency and layout
• Enhancing accessibility using tools like axe
• Google Material Design for interactive components

From us to you!

• 🏖️ Summer Fridays - 4-day work weeks for 12 weeks total from May-August 2023
• 🖥️ $500 work-from-home stipend to get you set up for 2023 ($200 annual WFH stipend for all PollEvians after their first year)
• 👩🏻‍🏫 $1,000 annual self-development budget + 2 additional days of PTO
• 💰$150/month internet & personal cell phone reimbursement
• ☕️ Monthly coffee and or tea subscription 🍵

Our users come from all kinds of communities, and so do PollEvians. We want to work with great people from a wide variety of backgrounds who put a lot of care and pride into their work. We're committed to providing you with opportunities to learn, and we’re looking to hire people with good judgment.

If you don’t meet 100% of the above qualifications or check off all the boxes, you should still  seriously consider applying. An important part of our interview process is understanding why this position and our mission particularly resonated with you.