We are a five-person startup, and each member of our team plays multiple roles.

We are still an early-stage company and are looking for folks who are excited by the breadth of work they'll get to do here. As an engineer, you'll not only work across the entire stack, but you’ll also be involved in initiatives and projects that fall outside of the traditional “software engineering” scope.

We don't yet have a dedicated Head of Growth, Head of Customer Support, or many other important roles. At our current stage, all team members are involved in all aspects of the business: we discuss growth strategies, answer support emails, and are all responsible for staying compliant. One of the most important qualifiers for working at Compound is an excitement around tackling different business and technical needs. If you’re interested in seeing a startup at the very earliest stage – because you want to broaden your skills, you enjoy working on different projects, or you’d like to create your own startup at some point, Compound would probably be a good fit. No background in finance or fintech is required.

We are a collaborative team and our engineers, PMs, and designers work closely with our academic team members.

To support the interests and strengths of everyone on our team, there are various roles you can try out, or grow into. This isn’t a requirement, and thus some team members choose to focus on depth instead. Below is a little more information about what each of these roles do and who may be interested in them:

Product definition

One way that breadth shows up in this role is the overlap with product management work: sometimes, we need to be comfortable taking a high-level goal and figuring out how to get there, without a detailed spec. A few examples of these projects areas are performance optimization, capacity planning, and improving product stability. Other times there are more tangible specifications that come from working with our designers, product managers, and members of the academic team, like building specific new interfaces, product features, or entirely new products.

Tech lead

For folks who have not previously been in a technical leadership position but are interested in developing those skills, we have a tech lead role per engineering pod. We see Tech Lead as a role to play for a period of time, rather than a commitment along a career track.

High-level engineering support

We believe that being in touch with the challenges that our faculty and learners are running into helps to build a healthy sense of empathy and sense of product quality. We have engineering support rotations to periodically help out our frontline support staff.

Recruiting and interviewing

We include folks from across our team in the interviewing process. Whether you are seasoned at running interviews or completely new to it, we want to offer a way for you to be included in the interviewing process. We use pairing and shadowing in interview sessions to onboard and share knowledge.

At Meraki, engineers don’t hesitate to cross technology barriers to ship a compelling product.

You’ll never be told you can’t make changes to another part of the codebase just because you haven’t done so before. In fact, many of our greatest wins came from engineers who didn’t hesitate to cross technical boundaries. The camera team shipped their first product with just four full-time software engineers who tackled everything: board bring-up, integration of vendor SDKs for video recording, the deployment of backend systems for proxying video streams, and the design and implementation of the user interface in our web app. This is just one of many examples showcasing the breadth that engineers have at Meraki.

We want you to challenge yourself by exploring different technologies, piloting new projects, and understanding the full range of Meraki technology. At the end of the day, working cross-functionally and committing to whatever it takes to ship the best product possible is our collective goal. As an engineer, you can expect to work with our product, backend, frontend, and UI/UX teams, as well as interact with customers to see how features are received.

Moreover, to support your career growth, we offer a rotation program within software engineering that allows participants to spend time on up to 3 different teams. While entry-level engineers can rotate between teams in our San Francisco office for four-month projects, those who are more tenured have the opportunity to travel internationally and work on projects with our remote teams for up to six weeks.

Notes Day exploratory session in San Francisco.

Engineers are involved in design and product decisions, defining the roadmap, prioritizing work on a day-to-day basis, hiring, and everything else in between.

We have an informal, “bottom-up” organizational style where all employees participate in making significant decisions. Engineers have significant opportunities to be proactive. As an example, here’s our process for defining our roadmap. We’re a mostly remote team, so we gather in person once a quarter and spend an entire day deciding what to take on next. Every team member will come up with 10-20 proposals, large or small. We then collectively evaluate their benefits and costs and then decide upon a sequence of milestones for the coming quarter.

We need people who are able and excited to get their hands dirty with anything technical.

We don't believe in technical specialists at this size. Small startups change very fast and it is important that we are able to put our efforts towards the opportunities that are most critical to our success. That being said, we are eager to leverage a person’s passion or interest in a specific area. It is normal for engineers at Wove to fall in (and out) of niches. The real expectation is that everyone has a broad range of skills and *can* work on anything if needed.

“Michael McLay publicly asked, in 1994, what would happen to the Python language if Guido van Rossum were hit by a bus.”

Developers are not silos, they can have specialties but the “Bus Factor” (the ability of a company to continue performing despite employees getting hypothetically hit by a bus!), in Loylap needs to be quite high. The higher the Bus Factor, the higher the probability the company can continue to function.

Wearing many hats is important to the overall function of the company, but it also benefits individuals. If a you wear a few hats and a role becomes redundant due to a tech stack change or loss of big client, you can simply wear another hat. If we lose a person, there’s a good chance the institutional knowledge they had won't also be lost, because another member in the company has similar knowledge. While roles can become redundant, people never do.

Backend, frontend, public npm modules, heroku, nginx – you’ll do it all!

At this point, given our company’s size, everyone has their hands on everything. It’s not required that new hires come to ReadMe with a wide breadth of experience, but a willingness to jump in and learn different parts of our stack is important. We suspect we’ll hire for more specialized roles to take responsibility and fully own different parts of our stack as we grow, but for now, we’re looking for folks with some level of “full-stack”-ness.

We also host an API conference every year called API Mixtape. Everyone in the company travels to San Francisco to attend and is encouraged to engage with our community. Engineers also have opportunities to speak! In the past, Marc has presented ReadMe’s new features and Dom gave a talk on best practices in API documentation. We have fun with the event and built a light display for the stage that changes color based on the current speaker’s company. The light display has been repurposed for our office wall and is editable via an API. (Ask for the web address if you want to change the lights in our office!)

Do more than just code.

Gem is a small, cross-functional team, and engineers spearhead all sorts of projects to help the rest of the company.

At Gem, when you see gaps or potential for improvement anywhere in the company, you’re empowered to do something about it. Your teammates will back you up. We’ve had engineers generate lead lists for sales, plan events, build customer success dashboards, analyze our data for recruiting best practices, and get heavily involved in recruiting — all because they saw an opportunity to help out.

We don’t expect new hires to have experience outside of engineering, but we value the curiosity to learn. And for anyone interested in contributing to more than just the codebase, you’ll find an abundance of opportunities to do so.

We believe great ideas and great work can come from anywhere.

It’s not uncommon for backend engineers to roll up their sleeves and make frontend updates to surface new features (and vice-versa). Engineers at Caviar are encouraged to reach out and fill in where needed. For example, if your team is working on a new project and has decided a new service is necessary, you might pause feature work and spend a few days (or weeks) creating and configuring new cloud resources. Or perhaps a vulnerability has been discovered within a feature, and since the original author is on vacation, you are tasked with closing the vulnerability.

There are no site reliability engineers at Caviar, so engineers are responsible for building new products and keeping them up and running as the business grows. What if the PM on your team is preoccupied? No worries. You can step in and represent the engineers on your team to provide updates to the business on the status of your team’s projects in development.

And it’s not just engineering boundaries that are traversable. We hold quarterly Hack Weeks to prototype the fun ideas, the terribly-obvious features, and the moonshots. At the end of each Hack Week, we hold a science fair-style demo day to showcase our work! Winners of previous Hack Weeks have gone on and turned those ideas into live features that are still in the product today.

We are looking for people who aren’t just comfortable wearing many hats, they prefer it.

If you haven’t worked at an early stage startup before, we hope you’ll take the time to fully understand what comes with it. There’s less structure. We don’t have a multi-month roadmap. We want you to help us drive, fill gaps, and make important decisions. You should want to create and build out Precious on your own, not because someone else is expecting you to. In addition to the many responsibilities you’ll juggle, you should also be aware of how influential our next hires will be. Whoever we next bring onto our team will define the future of our company’s culture and product. Hopefully, they’ll also care deeply about how they shape both.

All of our engineers are full stack.

We want everyone to have a general understanding of our system, and for any engineer to be able to fix any bug or implement any feature regardless of which part of the stack it touches. We also expect every team member to have a general understanding of the needs of the business, and to be able to help out on projects that are outside of their core role. As our team grows we’ll have more specialization, so it’s not a disqualifying factor if someone wants to focus just on the backend or just on the front end, but if you’re looking for broad exposure in order to gain experience across the board, you’ll find it here.

You don’t work at Samsara just to code.

Anubhav, a Samsara engineer, is a perfect example of how our team wears many hats. Anubhav joined Samsara the summer after he graduated from MIT and during his first week he was asked to build a sensor to measure the health of industrial machines such as large pumps and compressors. (Fun fact: unplanned machine downtime can cost manufacturing facilities up to $250K/hour!) After just a couple of weeks, he had built a prototype and traveled to a customer site to install the sensor and test the dashboard. Anubhav’s work was then showcased at the next board meeting and our industrial product line was born. Engineers at Samsara have responsibilities that span across customer research, product management, design, and of course, engineering. We want to hire people who like getting involved in a number of areas, enjoy working with various people, and are energized by the breadth of work that exists here.

We won’t limit you to one narrow set of responsibilities or role.

We try to encourage growth in our team members’ strengths, while appropriately challenging any weaknesses. We find that drawing hard lines between technical responsibilities can often hinder our ability to move quickly, so we don’t. Do you work on the front end but know how to handle that issue with the API? Go for it! Just send a pull request for the backend team to review. Are you a designer who has experience in web development? Great, our designer is also a front end developer! We fully support individuals who have broad skills. In fact, we think that’s wonderful. For those wanting to round out their skill set, we think our team is a great place to do it. Our current team members come from many different backgrounds and have varying levels of experience with many aspects of our technology stack –– everyone has something to learn and we encourage that everyone does.

We are growing quickly, so we encourage people to fill the gap and wear as many hats as they want.

Want to learn more about operations and the business side of Flexport? Phenomenal, do it. Learn about their pain points and go build product to solve them.

Kevin built our permission policy system, and single handedly ran our infrastructure for over a year. He flew to our Shenzhen office to improve site performance behind the Great Firewall.

Chase, an engineer who was recently promoted to engineering manager, led our customs team for a year. He spoke with our operations squads and customs brokers on a daily basis. He created the product specs, coded solutions, and assembled the engineering team.

Inherent to being on a small team, we all have what would be a few roles at a larger company.

Engineers at Vanta are full stack, coding and designing front- and back-end pieces of Vanta. Everyone receives support emails (though not everyone answers them.) Engineers at Vanta make design and product decisions, define the roadmap, and prioritize their own work on a day-to-day basis, hire new team members, and everything else in between. These are some of the hats you can expect to wear should you join us.

Being multifaceted is incredibly important to us because we work on the highest-priority issues, and the highest-priority thing isn’t restricted to a single part of the tech stack. Having exposure across the stack and departments suits folks who enjoy going broad rather than deep, as well as anyone interested in founding a company someday.

We’re a small team, which means we’re all responsible for many things.

Each of our current team members have really diverse backgrounds, so we get to learn a lot from one another. For example, Mark is well versed in music and teaching which lends itself well to his articulate expression of coding problems. And Robert ran a large online community for architecture students which has translated well to customer success and helping rally support for our company.

Perhaps more uniquely, we don’t silo anyone because of their labeled skillset. Action is the great equalizer. Have an awesome idea? Mock it up and show it off, then let’s see how we can either improve it or get it into production. At Monograph an engineer can provide illustration work and a salesperson is able to give design feedback.

At Apto, we lend a hand to work on any and all projects as needed.

Apto is a platform with multiple components, which means engineers have the opportunity to be involved with various functions. These include:

1. Core – the fundamental piece of transaction processing and card issuing.
2. Experience – SDKs, this is layered on top of Core, and is how we communicate with our end users (APIs, messaging, notifications, and branding).
3. Program Setup – compliance, bank program management, card manufacturers, interfacing with VISA and MasterCard.

Similarly, as we grow the company, roles will naturally evolve to meet company needs. For example, Ivan started as an iOS lead and was the only person in Barcelona. As we scaled in Barcelona and grew the team there, Ivan became both a coordinator and manager. He now spends more time coordinating between offices. He still occasionally pushes PRs, but the majority of his focus is on strategy and supporting the other engineers at Apto.

While we do have specialists across our entire engineering organization, we want a large part of our team to have breadth and be able to jump in on a wide variety of problems.

We want front end engineers that like to tweak APIs and update backing data models. We want back end engineers who make sure that the client SDKs are easy to use and running efficiently. We want engineers who solve problems at all levels, from the initial product conception to the maintenance and monitoring in production. We think this is important for a couple of reasons:

1. The less isolated engineers are in their particular disciplines, the better they will be at solving problems for our members and for other engineers.
2. We will never have enough people to do all the work we have. Being multi-disciplined (or being willing to try) means that you’ll be working on all sorts of problems.
3. The skills we need today may not be the same as the skills we need tomorrow. As we evolve, we want our engineers to evolve with us.

You’ll wear at least four: engineer, product manager, designer, and end-user.

As an example, one of our engineers focuses on our record collection product. He works closely with operations that does record collection and therefore manages feature requests, designs the product, executes, and tests it. Our hope is to hire engineers who can get behind our mission and understand who our audience is. While having personal experience in healthcare isn’t necessary, it certainly makes you much more effective. If you can empathize and connect with your end-user, you’ll be designing and building a product for yourself. Not only does it make the work that much more meaningful, but it also gives you valuable insight throughout development.

Engineers at Nova are full-stack and have their hands on more than just code.

Engineers rotate to different pods and projects, most of which are cross-functional. Initially, our job postings were divided into frontend and backend roles, but given that Nova engineers often work across the stack and have varied interests, we’ve since changed our open roles to “Software Engineer.” When you join Nova, you won’t be pigeonholed and have the option to fluidly move across our stack (and even do non-engineering tasks if you want).

Because we're a small company trying to accomplish big things, we take every opportunity to "tie each other's shoes." Team members often wear multiple hats, and sometimes this means doing maintenance tasks like (un)loading the dishwasher or building desks for new hires.

For engineers interested in getting involved in other kinds of work, we also have internal initiatives and task forces that welcome new ideas and members. You can join or participate in our inclusion committee, help to plan our next offsite, sit in on BD meetings, or contribute to sourcing and recruiting efforts.

If you’re interested in learning more about our team or talking to one of us, we’d love to hear from you! You can apply to jobs here or message any one of us on Linkedin.

This isn’t a job, it’s a lifestyle — you’ll jump into the deep end.

Being a startup, we value giving our employees the opportunity to gain a wide range of experiences. For example, if you are an engineer and want to learn more about product management and strategy, our product manager, Julia, will mentor and share tasks with you so that you can gain practical experience. We believe in a “giving with healthy boundaries mindset.” We are transitioning from outsourced development to in-house right now and have been able to grow to a 21-person team serving over 1,900 clients across 48 states with basic technologies. Now that we have gained so much traction, we are ready to fully invest in our technology and develop an app that will carry us through the next stages of our company. There is tremendous potential for our current Rails app to not only uplevel all of our human operations, but also streamline basic processes for our internal team members and clients.

We’re looking for engineers who are excited for the breadth of work that needs to be done and are drawn to the potential to move into more leadership roles at the company. If you have any questions at all, please don’t hesitate to reach out. We look forward to meeting you!

Position works on billable client work four days a week.

On Fridays, we do everything else -- and this can include invoicing, recruiting, marketing, sales, accounting, legal paperwork, planning, and much more. When important projects come up (for example, “becoming a cooperative”), we create working groups of one or two people to make sure everything gets done.

We greatly value all this non-development work. However, we also believe that we do better work when we are able to focus, and we hope to reduce the number of hats each of us wears over time.

If Position’s values sound exciting and interesting, we encourage you to check out our open positions and apply! If you’d like to know more about Position or if you have questions, you can also email us at [email protected].