Serverless Software Engineer for Insurtech Startup
Job Description
ABOUT YOU:
You’re an experienced software engineer with a passion for infrastructure, security, and reliability and a track record working with data-intensive, API-driven software platforms. You have experience architecting complex systems, working with various frameworks and data stores, and making the appropriate trade-offs to fit the needs of a particular problem. You’re keen to push the boundaries of rapid delivery and are comfortable working with and keeping up to date on the latest advancements in cloud infrastructure.
You’re passionate about automation, reproducibility, and resiliency, ensuring that any task that needs doing repeatedly can happen autonomously, that you’ll know if it fails to work, and that you’ll have the tools and techniques at your disposal to debug if needed.
You think about security as a first-order concern and are passionate not only about shipping secure software yourself but helping others improve their security practices. You also recognize the inherent tension between security and usability and can have difficult conversations with multiple stakeholders (including externally) to shape security posture at all levels of the stack.
You have worked with products over multiple releases and developed a sense of what it means to build software for long-term maintainability. You are passionate about your work but recognize that building software is a long-term team sport, not an individual sprint. You love well-thought-out architecture, maintainable code, and seamless user experiences. You are looking to help build a product that will be a crucial part of many users’ daily workflow.
OUR STACK
We are building a greenfield product on a modern AWS-based serverless technology stack. Our current toolbox includes Ruby/GraphQL (API), React/Apollo (frontend), Python/Airflow (data), Elasticsearch, Postgres, Terraform, and many related technologies. We strive to make technology choices that enable our team and product to scale easily and limit our exposure to operational burdens. We’re not technology zealots, and our team members have a high degree of autonomy to choose the tools they feel best address the challenges at hand. We iterate quickly and deploy continuously while striving to keep the quality of our user experience high and our codebases tidy. And we have a lot of fun doing it together.
YOUR WORK
KNOWLEDGE, SKILLS, AND ABILITIES:
COMPENSATION
$120 - 160k / year (DOE)
At this time, we can only consider United States-based applicants with authorization to work in the United States on a permanent, full-time basis; unfortunately, we cannot provide visa sponsorship or remote employment outside of the United States.
OUR CORE VALUES
Collaboration. We are playing a team sport. Building a successful enterprise is a team effort. But it is important to distinguish a team dynamic from a family dynamic. Teams thrive on unwavering support, respect and openness – but not unconditional acceptance. Talented jerks have no place on a great team. We consistently challenge each other to improve every day – not only with respect, but with uncommon positivity.
Autonomy. This is not a little kid’s soccer team. We believe extreme autonomy is valuable in not only maintaining happy, productive people, but also in building impactful, innovative products. So we don’t all swarm to the ball. We hire intelligent, diligent, passionate people who are capable of operating in large, sometimes ambiguous problem spaces with a great deal of freedom and decision-making authority. In exchange, we expect everyone to dig in, learn deeply about the space and take initiative every day.
Improvement. “Kaizen” is part of our everyday vocabulary. Our technology, our industry and our clients are always in a constant state of flux. We must regularly evolve with them, or we will quickly fall behind. That’s why we are dedicated to practicing “Kaizen,” the Japanese concept of continuous improvement. This means we are, above all, a learning culture. We approach every problem with a beginner’s mind. We look to improve every part of what we do, every day – from our product to our process and beyond. We always strive to give and receive feedback, even when it is difficult. And we allocate time specifically for learning and reflection, so we can avoid our failures and replicate our successes.
Transparency. Having stake in the business is about more than just equity. We believe the best way to give people stake in the business is to give them full visibility into it. That’s why we share everything transparently, from ongoing client meetings and project statuses to project financials. This allows everyone to see the work they’re doing and understand how that work ladders up, connects and impacts the business. This complete context enables better collaboration, more autonomy and faster improvement.
Empowerment. We believe in leading from behind. We believe great managers should act as resources, not gatekeepers. We keep organizational hierarchy minimal, and use it only as a way to help people achieve their maximum potential. This semi “flat” culture allows anyone in the organization to not only bring radical ideas to the table, but also to pursue them fully, without bureaucratic barriers in the way.
Kindness. Challenge directly, care personally. Kindness doesn’t simply mean being nice. And doesn’t mean avoiding constructive conflict. Kindness to us means challenging ideas with positive intent. It means being intentional, honest and generous with the way we treat one another, our partners, our clients and the world. We are hell bent on building an uncommonly positive and forthright culture, because we believe this form of kindness has the power to transform our work, our business and our industry.