Senior Software Engineer - remote

The short version

Early-stage venture-backed startup looking for a software engineer to use Python, Javascript, and HTML/CSS to help build out our web platform. Good fit if you like moving fast, having impact, and working on a variety of different things.

Who we are

We’re a fast-moving startup with a vision to empower all professionals by helping them build better relationships. Our vision is to fix the network gap: the inequality of opportunity driven by not having the right connections. To solve this problem, we’re combining the best practices of the world’s top relationship builders with artificial intelligence.

We’re building a mission-driven team that strives to live out our values every day:

• Customer-centricity
• Diversity of perspective
• Authenticity
• Growth (individual and collective)
• Impact

We’re an ambitious, driven team and we push ourselves to accomplish a lot quickly. In the past couple of years we've gone through one of the world's top accelerators, raised two rounds of venture financing, launched our product, rapidly grown our customer base, and architected a robust set of machine learning models as a core source of competitive advantage. In the process, we’ve been named one of Chicago’s top 50 startups to watch, one of Chicago Inno’s 50 on Fire, a part of the highly selective Google for Startups Black Founders Accelerator and Black Founders Fund. And we’re just getting started!

The opportunity

4Degrees is at an inflection point - we’ve built a product that’s pioneering a new category of software (relationship intelligence), and are rapidly growing. We're well funded, have hundreds of highly engaged customers, who consistently increase their contract size with us, and are planning with us on how we can take this company into the future. We’ve done this with a scrappy, early-stage team.

The opportunity ahead of us is vast - every business that relies on their relationship network to drive their business has a use case for 4Degrees. To seize that opportunity, we're looking for great engineers to help us build on top of the foundation we've created, while also pioneering new ways to help our customers unlock the value their relationships can bring to their business. You’ll build and use a versatile set of skills: switching between tasks like rolling out major new functionality, diagnosing and fixing bugs, and playing support for other front-end or back-end engineers.

By joining us, you will play a highly impactful role in re-inventing the way professional relationships are managed and building a rapidly growing category. Along the way, you’ll have an opportunity to get unrivaled exposure to all facets of building a startup, and directly shape the outcomes of 4Degrees and its customers. And if you want to build a company of your own after joining us, you'll get direct mentorship from the founding team and support in doing so!

The impact you’ll make by joining us

Within 1 month you’ll:

• Complete our onboarding process - which will help you ramp up on our company, vision, product, key objectives, and how your role will contribute to all of those!
• Dive deep into our product development process and understand how we go from concept to design to implementation
• Learn our technical stack and apply development patterns throughout your work
• Ship your first small feature to our customers
• Join our customer outreach program - including sitting in on your first set of live conversations with existing customers.

Within 3 months you’ll:

• Assume ownership of a quarterly roadmap project, which will enable you to drive the development of a key piece of functionality for our customers
• Drive timely resolution of customer issues, in coordination with the customer success and implementation teams.
• Have made a visible impact on the product for all 4Degrees users

Within 6 months you’ll:

• Reliably ship full features to our customers and for internal team use
• Understand the product at scale and be able to provide input to improve our technical systems and tools
• Be comfortable navigating most of our stack and infrastructure
• Participate in interviewing and hiring, as a way to influence team growth and how our values inform our culture

Within 1-2 years, you’ll:

• Be responsible for the planning, scoping, design, and implementation of new features
• Champion future engineering initiatives
• Help build and shape the future of engineering at 4Degrees

About you

• Excited about the 4Degrees mission and believes in our core values
• Thrives in a fast-paced environment, and is comfortable with experimentation and risk-taking
• Driven by the opportunity to create impact, and takes full ownership of achieving personal and team objectives
• Motivated to explore the potential for technology to augment people’s ability to form and strengthen professional relationships
• Challenges existing industry best practices and takes inspiration from disparate sources to build a groundbreaking product
• Collaborative mindset - recognizing that most great outcomes are accomplished by teams, not individuals

Skills you’ll need

• Proficiency with back-end programming (Python preferred, but we can train you if you're good with Ruby, Node, PHP, etc.)
• Proficiency with front-end programming in vanilla languages (Javascript, HTML, CSS)
• Comfort with plain SQL and an ORM

We’d be really excited if you are

• Experienced with mobile development, particularly using React Native
• Experienced with the Flask web framework
• Experienced with machine learning and/or statistical analysis

Benefits

• Competitive cash+equity compensation based on level of capability
• Unlimited PTO (min. 2 weeks, avg. 3-4)
• Unlimited paid sick leave (mandatory for infectious diseases)
• Employer group health insurance, subsidized 75% by company
• Annual professional development stipend
• Commuter benefits