Junior Tech Project Manager

In Bookmate, we build applications that make reading or listening to books even better. Over the years, we’ve also built a company that we love. Come say hi (and maybe stay for a while?)

The Product

Bookmate is a subscription based e-book service that makes reading accessible to anyone in the world with a mobile phone. We inspire millions of people around the globe to read more, discover new books and find new friends with common interests.

Bookmate brings readers, authors, publishers, brands and distribution partners together through a strong business model. Bookmate is actively growing in Europe (including Scandinavia and the Balkans), Latin America, South East Asia and Africa.

Numbers? Easy: 13M users, around 2M books, audiobooks and comic books in our catalog, 16 languages and 20K publishers.

The Team

We are an international and distributed team of enthusiasts who love books, reading and being a part of something bigger than ourselves. We’re thinking about creating a dreamy bookish lifestyle. Meaning that yeah, our business is partly built on content distribution, but we really would like to build a whole experience of reading, listening, learning and being together for our customers and ourselves - and make our app an inseparable part of it.

We like to think of ourselves as a fantastic crew, and we’re always ready to welcome someone on board.

The Tech

We’re building our dream around 3 customer-faced products (website, iOS app and Android app). Bookmate backend is written in Ruby and Ruby on Rails. Our reader is considered best-in-class in the whole industry of reading apps. Our code base is 10+ years old and incorporates over 50k commits, but we’re always open to any innovations in terms of code or technologies applied to achieve business results.

The Role

The general idea of the role of a Junior Tech PM in Bookmate is to provide project management support on the projects being delivered by cross-functional teams including both technical and business development staff. We don’t look for any specific PM frameworks or approaches. Who we’re looking for is a person able to:

• Keep the roadmap of the upcoming projects reasonable and regularly updated while adding to it a certain understanding of what resources are currently available in which teams;
• Keep the work being done on the project properly organized: a project Slack channel created, participants added, requirements gathered and fixed in an understandable form, tasks in Jira created and assigned, deadlines agreed upon and communicated, conflicts (if any) either prevented or managed, and everyone knows what’s the next task to be done;
• Constantly keep track on how the projects are progressing and prevent any deadlines from being missed; constantly remind the participants about upcoming deadlines and making sure that nothing stops them from meeting said deadlines;
• Communicate in a very clear and concise manner the current status of any project or task;
• Assist in the meetings with external partners by ensuring that all the requirements for our future joint projects are gathered and fixed in an understandable form and everyone is on the same page

About You

To make this collaboration as long and productive as possible, please consider our requirements for the position:

• A good level of written and spoken English (ideally, closer to C1). As an international company, we communicate in English, and you’ll be required to organize and lead team meetings with English-speaking participants.
• Familiarity with engineering culture and collaborative development. In general, what we want to see is some sort of technical background: you either came from a tech university, or had any sort of experience working with tech teams and tech companies before. You might also be a system/technical analyst, a QA engineer or even a developer seeking to switch to a more managerial role
• Ability to understand and pursue business-related goals. A tech PM in our case is a person who serves as an intermediary between business development and all other teams (such as design, tech, product etc..). So, you’ll need to firstly understand how our business works and monetizes itself, and then understand the main business goals that need to be pursued and supported by all sorts of improvements.
• Ability to communicate in a very clear, calm and concise manner with staff of various levels of expertise and backgrounds

Bonus points and kudos from our side, if you have:

• Some knowledge or even experience in making subscription-based services or services related to content distribution
• Some previous PM experience, relevant professional education or certifications

Our hiring process

Like what you see? We’re glad to hear that. Our hiring process is very simple:

• Send your CV and/or a portfolio of projects to hr@bookmate.com. A hiring manager will contact you and invite you for a quick screening interview by Google Meet or Zoom (appr. 30 minutes). We’ll talk about your previous experiences and answer any questions about Bookmate as a company.
• If the screening interview goes well, you’ll be invited to a more detailed interview with a few of C-level executives, who will be your main contacts during the future work in Bookmate.
• After this interview, no more than 1 week passes before we’re ready to share the final decision with you.

Frequently asked questions

Is Bookmate an international company?**

Yes, we’re working on European, Latin American and Asian markets. Our team is international and distributed all over the world.

Does Bookmate offer any options for relocation?

We’re currently offering the option to relocate to Belgrade, Serbia. If you’re willing to relocate, we can provide you with the details of what exactly can we do to make this process easier. Unfortunately, we can’t help you with relocation to another country.

Does Bookmate support remote work?

Yes, but you should be available during typical CET working hours. If you’re close to one of our offices, you’re very welcome to come work in it.