Syook - Associate IoT Engineer (1-3 yrs)

Associate Engineer - IoT

Who are we :

Syook is an established startup headquartered in Bengaluru, working in the B2B space. We are currently on the path of high growth and productivity, and great culture building (because we know the two go hand in hand)! We are looking for folks who will ask questions like why/why not, what can I do to make this better, how can I help the company and most importantly, what can the company do to help you!

Our flagship product Syook InSite allows businesses to visualize their operations, providing information that can easily translate into measurable impact on the bottom-line. InSite is an Industrial Internet-of-Things (IIoT) solution that uses Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) beacons to generate highly-accurate location data of all your resources (both assets and people), at much lower costs than comparable technologies. The result: Quick RoI and Improved Operational Performance. It's Industry 4.0, ready for deployment!

Role overview :

First and foremost, we're looking for people who are excited about what we're doing - you don't need to know everything about IoT, but should be excited to learn. We're building in an entirely new space, so you'll be able to use creativity to help us solve problems and delight our customers.

IoT Engineers play an important part in our company's product development process, and in ensuring that the platform delivers maximum value from different types of IoT hardware. As the name goes, you should be fussed about IoT hardware out in the market, and more importantly be able to quickly onboard new IoT hardware and validate them for the customer use cases.

Being an IoT Engineer, you will work closely with the Product and Engineering Team, and you'll have the chance to make a difference to the platform. Most of your day will be dedicated to firmware design & development, research & coordinating with the product and engineering team. You should have the foresight to build a robust hardware portfolio that will ensure increased adoption of the Product, ease of use & result in customer delight.

You will see yourself progress and grade up to successive positions sooner than you would expect. If you're passionate about hardware and are constantly thinking of 'What new things can be done with hardware?', and have an amazing knack for making things work, we'd love to meet you.

Why you might be excited about us :

We're working to solve a massive global problem and help organizations be more competitive. We love solving problems using technology and are bridging a massive gap in the operations excellence domain.

We're small, so you'll be able to contribute efficiently and without bureaucracy. You'll quickly have responsibility over big areas of our product.

Our team has a wide range of experiences (Oilfield, Telecom, Psychology PhD, etc.) and are excited to learn from you, too.

You'll be able to work independently and set your own schedule. We don't micromanage and will help you do great work. We trust our people and believe that each person here puts their best foot forward.

We'll mold your role to shape a career you're excited about. We care a ton about your satisfaction and job happiness, and will help prep you for whatever you're looking for in the future.

We work hard and also highly value balanced work/life. We care about family and your own personal development, and don't expect for you to be always engaged with work.

There will be plenty of opportunities for you to further your career and lead your team as we grow

Why you might not be excited about us :

We're growing (~50 people in the company now), so if you like more established companies, it's not (yet) the right time. You'll help build our company's culture.

Since we're a growing startup, projects and priorities may shift continuously and you must be comfortable with that.

Our customers love us, and there's a lot we can improve. It's a great place to be, but there may be some jank here and there. (Nothing too scary! )

We can't (yet) provide constant close mentorship for junior folks. As we grow, we'll get a lot better at this.

Since you'll have a lot of responsibility and creativity over projects, they may not be defined perfectly initially. You'll be expected to bring your own experience and perspective to help us do the right things, and raise flags if you think we should do things differently.

About you :

- None of these are requirements, but do describe the kinds of people that we think would be most effective at Syook right now.

- Must be flexible, independent and a self-starter who can work with little supervision.

- Love thinking broadly about problems and thinking creatively about how to solve them efficiently.

- Happy to try things out to validate new features, and move on if they no longer solve a problem.

- Excited for a front-row seat into a fast growing, early stage company. Things will change a lot!

- Enjoy thinking through trade-offs, with both mindfulness of short-term needs and our long-term direction.

- Happy writing documentation so that others can ramp up super easily and you're never a single-source-of- failure. We're a bit too small to have silos.

- You are driven and care about doing a good job and improving your craft.

- You have a growth mindset, can keep up with the latest technology changes and trends and suggest enhancements based on these

- Most importantly, you're the kind of person who is friendly, approachable, ready to help others and personally driven to put your best foot forward.

Technically these are some of the things we would like for you to have to be able to contribute effectively in this kind of a position :

- New Hardware R&D

- Prior hands-on experience (1-3yrs) of working with IoT hardware and firmware (sensors, gateways, hardware interfaces, communication technologies, different data protocols like MQTT, etc.)

- Knowledge of IoT Security (embedded on chip, TLS, etc.)

- IP Networking fundamentals (LAN, WiFi, etc.)

- Working knowledge of design and development of hardware portfolio

- Be able to research new technologies and identify new chips and study its features to solve problems as per requirement

- Give all relevant inputs for Build vs Buy decisions (develop something internally vs buy from other vendors)

- Design firmware for edge processing and analytics for the IoT Gateways

- Solution building / Productising hardware

- Be able to liaise with sales team and streamline customer inputs for translating to products / solutions

- Be able to liaise with sales team and give inputs for technical proposals and tender submissions

- Be able to liaise with product and engineering team for the development of algorithms and use cases from the hardware data stream

- Be able to liaise with operations team and give technical inputs for Hardware Supply Chain management (vendor identification and development, negotiation, cost control, inventory management)

- Streamline all relevant processes along with relevant stakeholders (Testing and R&D, Certification, Procurement, etc)

- Process Documentation

- Be able to liase with customer success team and ensure user manuals are up to date

- Have good understanding of Agile methodologies

- Working knowledge of software development languages and environments (C, C++, shell script, linux, Python, JS, docker)

- Apart from the above it would be a plus if you also have

- Knowledge of Project management tools like JIRA or equivalent

- Basic knowledge of GIT

Our current development practices :

Since we're a growing startup, we constantly have to ask "what gets the most value, cheaply, to validate our assumptions?" We build some things to last a long time, and others as prototypes.

We've documented our application so that you should be able to get started easily - and if you need help, we'll absolutely improve our docs - and contribute your first day.

We work in an Agile manner, our sprints are for 2 weeks and we push releases to production as per this schedule. In the sprint planning meeting all the requirements for all development get finalized and then the QA team starts documenting high level scenarios for all the user stories that are being developed. Once the development team hands over the builds to the QA team, QA executes all the scenarios they have documented, reports defects in JIRA and tracks all the issues in JIRA until they are fixed. When all the user stories/ features are tested we release the feature to our production server and keep a back track on the production server while it's being used by our clients. We do Sprint retrospective meetings to analyze the good and bad practices of the previous sprint and make sure not to repeat the same mistake, however carry forward all the best practices for the forthcoming sprints.

Joining our team

Interview process :

We want to get to know you, hear about what you're interested in, and learn about what you hope to do in the future.

1. Meet us and learn about Syook :

You'll first talk to someone from the People Services team (over phone or video) and won't need to prepare anything in advance. The goal of this conversation is to get to know you and mutually explore if we might be a good fit for each other. You'll learn more about Syook and have a chance to ask any questions about our company, team culture, and product.

If we're both excited to continue, we'll send along a bunch of information about the company that you can go through on our own time. You'll then have the opportunity to chat with other people in our company to learn more about them and the company.

2. Coding Challenge :

Everyone has different strengths, and we want you to do your best. Our goal is for you to clearly demonstrate your technical aptitude. We're open to accommodating what would work best for you.

We can choose mutually between several different options:

A live pair coding session where we'll work through some problems.

Working through similar problems independently as a take home challenge.

Presenting any previous work you've done (example: open source, side project, or even another interview you did).

3. Preliminary Technical Round :

We'll have a round over video conferencing. We will go through the details of core concepts of IoT like sensors, gateways, hardware interfaces, communication technologies, different data protocols like MQTT, etc. so be prepared to showcase all your skills and your craft. Bring your A game for this round as this will be your only chance to make a strong case for yourself. These discussions will be with one of the engineers at Syook whom you will end up working with.

4. Advance Technical Interview :

The final round will be with our CTO (Aman Agarwal). Here you have an opportunity to showcase your all rounded engineering nature. We will try and see how you can fit into our engineering culture and we'll discuss the bigger picture also. You will also get to understand what your role is all about and how you can grow with us. Feel free to ask for feedback at this stage, and any other questions you may have about the company and we will be happy to share the same.

5. People & Culture fit round :

If you reach this stage, it automatically means that we're convinced of your technical skills. However, that's never enough for us. We want to ensure that you will feel comfortable working with us and that we can give you an environment where you can be your productive best. We will use this discussion to understand what you bring to the table apart from your technical skills in terms of initiatives, personality, and a certain entrepreneurial mindset.

6. Reference conversations :

We will talk to a few people you've worked with before to learn more about how we can best work with you. We expect to hear good things, if not great things about you!

Getting Started

If you're excited to learn more, you can directly mail us (careers@syook.com). If we think you might be a fit, we'll respond really fast. Please let us know if you have timing constraints. Regardless, we'll try our best to respect your time along the process.

You can learn more about what we're up to:

Our company's website to learn more about the space we're working in, where we write about how IoT is a gamechanger to build smart factories and workspaces.

Check out our social media handles like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and Instagram

If you think you're a good fit here, then we should get talking!! If not, all the best with your job search.