At Spantree, a senior consultant is both a capable engineer and an adept communicator. They have broad technical experience with a focus on a few key areas. Working in a small team, they create solutions that fit into a client’s organization and align with their mission. Our senior consultants tackle difficult challenges, model our core values and mentor junior members of the team.
Our senior consultants are technical experts and trusted advisers to our clients. You'll be expected by us and by our clients to make key technical decisions. You'll have to be self-directed, learn quickly, behave with integrity, and mentor others on your team.
You have a track record of bringing teams together to deliver highly technical projects.
You are an excellent listener and communicator who takes the time to understand the problems of our clients and the challenges of the engineers you lead.
You have broad experience in software engineering, making a meaningful impact on projects you join. You have experience applying a technology-agnostic approach weighing new vs tried-and-true technologies to make the best decision on behalf of the client.
You are comfortable being vulnerable and learning in public. You can ask questions without having to know the answer. You are willing to make hard decisions but also keep an open mind and evolve your thinking when presented with new information.
You are a natural teacher and communicate effectively with technical and non-technical audiences. You enjoy brainstorming, diagrams, stakeholder interviews, technical writing, preparing proofs of concept, and presenting to customers and colleagues.
You adopt an engineering mindset to your work. You are both methodical and iterative. You focus more on your capacity to learn than the things you already know.
Our approach to projects typically involves delivering the whole solution and everything the client needs to run it. We try to focus on a specific stack and build tools around it so that we deliver quicker and more efficiently with each new project. The stack evolves over time as we find or create better tools. This is a snapshot of what we're looking for right now.
Spantree is a boutique technical agency focusing on custom software, data, and systems engineering services. We work with customers who have interesting problems, open minds, and an appetite for learning and experimentation.
We’re headquarted in Chicago’s West Loop, but we’ve spread out quite a bit since 2020. As of 2022, we now have team members everywhere from Rogers Park to Buenos Aires to Cairo. We try to hire talented people where they live and build a tight-knit community as if we all sat three feet away from each other.
Since 2009, we’ve had the privilege to work across a massive number of industries. We’ve done work in healthcare, food & agriculture, financial services, the legal world, retail & e-commerce, real estate, manufacturing, space exploration, and even a little professional baseball.
We strive to be one of the best places to work and some of the best people to work with. This goes beyond catered lunches. We seek to build and support a team of genuinely pleasant and interesting humans. We are strongly invested the success of our peers and help each other out whenever we can.
We believe that technology should serve humanity, transforming our lives for the better. That belief is rooted in our values and forms the foundation for the work that we do with each and every client.
Learn and share continuously.
Approach hard problems scientifically.
Tell the truth.
Be kind.
Build great things.
Eliminate tedium.
As a senior consultant, you will have to be an expert engineer and a good communicator. We'll expect you to take responsibility for large parts of a project, mentor others, and drive technical change.
Composing highly-effective delivery teams with the appropriate experience and skill sets to match the needs of a client project.
Designing technical toolchains through principled analysis of the problem space and various architectural options.
Applying agile practices to organize our collective efforts into a cohesive, actionable, and adaptable plan.
Steering functional goals of a project, negotiaing and prioritizing features based on risk, time, and budgetary constraints.
Providing team coaching and feedback to ensure your colleagues grow as engineers and practitioners throughout the course of their work.
Managing interpersonal client relationships as the first-line ambassador between our teams and key customer stakeholders.
At Spantree, learning and growing is at the core of what we do. We work together to create a safe environment where you are challenged to improve at your craft. From day one, you'll be provided with opportunities to step up and grow as an engineer and we'll support you every step of the way.
Within one Month of Joining the Team
You’ll work with a Lead Consultant on a project to learn how we do things at Spantree firsthand.
You’ll get hands-on opportunities to develop new areas of technical expertise using tools like TypesScript, GraphQL, React, Elasticsearch Prisma, Docker, Kubernetes, Neo4J, and Kafka.
You’ll pair frequently with fellow consultants on your team.
Within 3 - 6 Months of Joining the Team
You’ll adopt a leadership role on one or more components of customer projects, with the help and mentorship of another Lead Consultant.
You’ll start to participate in sales calls regarding new prospective projects to help us draft proposals, project plans, and Statements of Work.
You’ll regularly present things you’ve learned to your fellow Spantreers at our "demo days" lunch sessions.
You’ll mentor early and mid-career consultants.
Within 12 Months of Joining the Team
You’ll have an opportunity to lead or co-lead new customer projects and mentoring others to do the same.
You’ll start helping us to drive our tools and techniques roadmap to determine what we should explore and adopt.
You’ll gain opportunities to play a role in the Spantree’s strategic direction, helping us grow and evolve our vision of the company.
We provide excellent pay and benefits. We focus on a great work-life balance with a meaningful connection to your work and to your team.
Depending on experience and areas of expertise, our Senior Consultants typically earn anywhere from $140,000 to $170,000 per year.
We hear these questions most often from candidates. You can always reach out to us directly if you have more.
The interview process has four steps. Each step takes progressively more time and we typically space the steps over a period of two to three weeks. We can speed up or slow down the process somewhat depending on how easy it is for you to make time in your schedule.
Here are the four phases of the interview that you can expect:
After each step, including the “day in the life”, you should expect us to follow up with you within 48 hours. If at any point in the process you get a competing offer, please let us know and we’ll try to work something out.
We like to say Spantree is a place where you will wear many hats. As much as we all enjoy designing architectures, building systems, and writing code, there are other tasks to get a project over the finish line that we all pitch in on. This could be...
We emphasize work-life balance and we typically make ourselves available to clients 9a to 5:30p cental during the week. However, our “please be at work” times are 10a to 3p central as we have a company-wide “global stand” around lunchtime. Each project team generally has the ability to figure out a schedule that works for them and the clients. Since we’re dealing with all sorts of software in production, there will be times that we’ll need to jump in after hours to mitigate a production emergency or deploy some code, but this is very much the exception and not the rule.