Founding Engineer - remote

Prefix
Posted 2 years ago

Howdy, we’re Prefix 👋🏾


We're people against toil. Our goal is to help restaurants operate more effectively and efficiently. Repair and maintenance operations are a major burden for restaurants of all sizes, so we’re building software to save them time and money, freeing them to focus on what matters: making delicious food.


We’re building a company where we are proud to work. Prefix is remote-first with a flexible schedule. We strive to be clear in our communication and over-communicate by default. It's early stage, so you’ll have the opportunity to shape not only the product, but the company, how we work together, and how our business develops. We’re seeking personalities, experiences, and opinions to foster a diverse and inclusive workplace.


Team


The cofounder duo are experienced startup people managers, half product-focused and half engineering-focused, and allergic to internal politics. With our venture pre-seed funding, we’re hiring our founding engineering team with runway through mid-2023.


The Opportunity


As a founding software engineer, you’ll help to build the core, customer facing product from zero to MVP to paying customers. You’ll be part of evaluating and selecting our infrastructure, frameworks, and development productivity stack. You will collaborate with product and design to drive release of major features and help process the first-hand feedback from users. You will also instantiate and maintain standards, patterns, and best practices for well-tested, maintainable code both as an contributor and code reviewer. You’ll pair program with colleagues several hours each week to learn, to mentor, to unblock, and to have fun. You’ll have visibility and input into the direction of the product and the business. You’ll have a front row seat to building a SaaS company.


Product stack + tech stack + process


Especially for remote development, tools, process, and an evolving approach matter. We’ve been using Twist and Loom for async communication, Meet for meetings, Notion and Figma for documentation, and are still evaluating project management tools (if you have opinions about Height, Linear, Constructor, Jira, Asana, Notion, et al, give us a shout!). Tech stack includes git(hub), typescript, react, and postgres. We’re eager to adopt tools that reduce engineer toil, increase speed without sacrificing quality, have a scaling story or exit path, and make engineers smile – tools like tRPC, cypress, and railway seem well suited. We’re working in two week cycles with planning and retrospectives on Friday with daily async standup to stay on the same page. Our only synchronous expectations are reasonable availability for weekly 1:1s, pairing, and planning/design meetings 11am-5pm Eastern, otherwise, we want to empower you to work on your schedule.


Desired skills

  • 3+ years of experience as a software engineer in tech companies with track record of thoughtful software delivery
  • Experience with front-end design or full-stack product development or senior-level backend experience with a demonstrated ability to learn new skills
  • Clear, empathetic, thoughtful written communication, always assumes good intent
  • Exposure to some flavor of agile development in a remote context

Within 1 month, you will

  • Collaborate with team members in weekly pair-programming sessions
  • Contribute to improved DevOps, CI/CD, or development tooling and infrastructure
  • Discuss your career growth goals and give feedback in weekly 1:1 with manager
  • Teach other members of the team through design feedback, code review, and pairing

Within 3 months, you’ll

  • Evaluate and select new tools, frameworks, or libraries used in development and production
  • Plan, design, build, release, and support several major feature releases
  • Grow comfortable contributing and reviewing code across most of the tech stack
  • Provide feedback on culture, values, or processes that are lacking
  • Connect with your colleagues via weekly 1:1 coffee chats
  • Have balanced decisions on tech debt against customer impact

Within 9 months, you’ll

  • Produce an MVP that customers like (because they helped build it)
  • Own one or more major feature areas of the product
  • Have taken on-call shifts to diagnose and resolve production issues
  • Perform root cause analysis for a tech, process, product failure to prevented recurrence
  • Learn new techniques or tools to accomplish technical and business goals both independently and from teammates
  • Identify, prioritize, and improve areas of code base or infrastructure in need

Benefits

Competitive salary and equity: $155,000-$175,000 and 0.8%-1.25% equity. We aim to pay better than 3 out of 4 positions at our peers.

Remote First
– work anywhere you want. We require reasonable availability 11am-6pm Eastern for weekly 1:1s, pair-programming, and design/planning/retrospective meetings

Free gigabit internet – we think this is essential, but it can be pricey, so we’ll cover it

WFH office budget –
Get the computer, desk, chair, headphones, or whatever else you need to work from home comfortably

4
weeks vacation – time off is important, we’ll encourage you use it all

Standard benefit stuff –
100% individual healthcare coverage and 401(k) options