Hiring Python Developers - Best Practices & Job Description Template

Hiring Python developers is one of the fastest ways to unlock a broad range of skills and abilities for your firm. As one of the most popular languages for over a decade now, Python is a technology developers are eager to work with. The highly productive, highly attractive, and forward-looking nature of the language make it just as valuable a marketing tool as it is a technical one.

By advertising your business as one with the ability and desire to use the language and its libraries to their full potential, you will highlight your company as forward-looking, innovative, and a place to invest in high-quality engineering skills.

Our guide to hiring Python developers takes you from first choosing the language to documenting and ultimately deciding on the developer who will create your Python codebase. We’ve even included a job description template you can use to start searching for the Python developer that will drive your business forward.

With our guide, you are that much closer to using the Python language to provide the flexibility and tools to move in any direction you require. And need help finding a developer? Just tell us what you need, and we’ll do all the leg work for you! Within 72h we will connect you with up to 5 companies within 72h that match your needs—all for free.

Why Choose Python Development

The first and foremost advantage of Python is how comparatively easy the language is to learn and understand. With such a low barrier of entry, even developers new to the field can get up and running fast with a comparably shallow learning curve. As a result, additional engineers are drawn to the language daily.

Experienced developers also benefit from the readability and ease of access Python provides. Unfamiliar libraries are easier to pick up and available to investigate as future avenues of development for upcoming projects.

In addition to being highly approachable, Python is a language that also benefits from being highly flexible. Commonly used as an object-oriented language for most development projects, the language also supports procedural or functional programming just as easily. It’s a tool that’s designed to fit a solution rather than the other way round.

The headline feature of the Python language is undoubtedly the vast array of supporting libraries it has available. From machine learning to web frameworks and natural language recognition—Python is ideally suited to work on complex and difficult projects. Many of the language’s thousands of available packages can be installed, upgraded, or maintained with Python’s built-in package manager, pip.

Check out our Ultimate Guide to Python Frameworks in 2021 for a sampling of some of the most useful frameworks available in this flexible and popular language.

The productive and efficient nature of the language makes it ideally suited to trying out new ideas, exploring a new concept, or creating a prototype to work with. The time and cost invested in each of these using Python are notably less than many other languages.

Each of these features of the Python language makes a major selling point for application developers. From the ground up, Python is designed to take focus away from granular and boilerplate code and allow focus to be shifted to big picture problems.

When advertising for Python developers to hire into your firm, promote the features and benefits of the language that you value highly. These features demonstrate an appreciation for productivity, clean code, and problem-solving abilities. Chances are, these are the attributes also highly valued by your next application developer.

Factors to Consider When Hiring a Python Developer

• Project size. The scale of your project will determine everything from the size of the team, the experience needed at every level, and how many hours of work there are to be done. With a project’s size, you can gain an early estimate into how many junior, senior, and mid-level engineers you will need to hire.
• Technical requirements. Project managers and team leaders should decide on the features and functions a project should have at certain milestones in production. If the goal of the initial phases is an MVP, you should decide on what the core functionality of a project is and how you plan to scale and expand that functionality in the future.Outlining the technologies and features necessary for your project to succeed will feed into an outline of the engineers required at every level and inform your hiring decisions moving forward.
• Tech stack. The precise technologies, languages, and tools you intend to include in your project will define the expertise and experience of the developers you hire. For example, you will need at least one engineer with TensorFlow experience if you plan to use Google’s machine learning toolkit to achieve your goals.
• Management needs. Whether hiring a remote team or an internal worker, it’s important to have a handle on what management strategies you need to employ to get the most out of your Python developers. Our article on The Do’s and Don’ts of Managing an Outsourced Python Team can help you figure this out!

Looking at each of these factors with a technical head, project management lens, and hiring hat will decide the precise developers you eventually hire. The experience and expertise of these developers will help the right choice stand out from the crowd when it comes to looking at applicants in the weeks to come.

Documenting each step along the way before setting out on the process will make your hiring decisions that much easier in the future.

How to Hire Python Developers

The first and most important thing when it comes to hiring developers is intuition. The immediate sense of a candidate's general abilities and skills is usually more accurate than it gets credit for. Technical experience and years in software development give you a sense of the skills and relationships that will work on a project.

Finding the best engineers for a project isn’t about matching up the technologies on a CV with those on the requirements spec. If it was, a computer could do it. Use your technical leads to evaluate each candidate and decide where their general skills lie. Or better yet, just tell us what you need and let us do all the work for you (for free)! Within 72h you’ll be connected with up to 5 companies that meet your specifications.

Does a candidate’s experience revolve around data analytics, machine learning, or devOps? Even if they’ve not used identical libraries and frameworks laid out in the spec, experience in the field and on related projects often counts for a lot more.

A counter-intuitive step that firms are reluctant to take is to give out as much information about the project as they can. Software companies are often more keen than most to keep their cards close to their chest, to only tell people about the project once they’re hired into the firm. This is a mistake.

Keeping quiet about a project all but guarantees you’ll miss out on the developers most qualified, most enthusiastic, and most experienced in the precise technologies you’re implementing.

Create technical specs and share them with the world. Much like sharing the features and benefits of your technology stack, sharing the details will attract the right developers with specific skill sets to apply to you. Often, they’ll come with ideas, solutions, and enthusiasm to advance your projects.

Advantages of Hiring Python Developers

Hiring Python developers means advertising to a very wide pool of engineers. Rather than being a challenge in filtering and searching to find the right candidate, turn it into an advantage by utilising that same pool of development talent instead.

Be as open as you can about the technical challenges and the solutions you employ in your company. Describe the ideas, tools, and technologies you plan to implement in the very near future. The right developers with the ideas and technology to improve them will soon be writing to you.

And once you are ready to interview a candidate, our article on How to Interview a Python Developer and What to Look For has all the tips and tricks you need!

Python Job Description Template

Python Developer

[COMPANY] are looking for a Python developer for an exciting new role in one of the fastest moving and most innovative firms out there. We are looking for someone passionate about performance, reliability, and design with the experience and credentials to back up that passion. Someone who can take ownership of applications, solve technical challenges, and take pride in their solutions and code in cutting edge projects.

The ideal candidate will be a talented and capable problem solver with a high degree of curiosity and an inquisitive nature.

An amazing time to join our team, we are currently working on [COMPANY PROJECTS AND BENEFITS]

You’ll be a key member of the team tasked with contributing to a number of high-value projects within [COMPANY]. Excellent communication, collaboration, and project management skills would be a plus.

Qualifications

• Have several years experience delivering Python applications
• 5+ years in the software development industry
• Knowledge of at least one additional programming language
• Experience with third-party libraries and APIs;
• Solid foundations in object-oriented programming
• Experience the Agile development life-cycle;
• Experience with automated testing and building;
• Experience with Git, SVN, or other version control tools;
• Proven experience in writing readable code, creating extensive documentation for existing code, and refactoring previously written code

Location

• [Office Location]

To apply

• Please send a CV and covering letter which highlights relevant experience and why you’d be a good fit for the role to: [HR@company.com]