Senior/Lead Ruby on Rails and React Developer - remote
Onramp Funds
Posted 3 years ago
Onramp Funds is a FinTech startup that helps e-commerce sellers manage their product inventory lifecycles with financing and insight tools.
We've launched a beta product with active customers, and are seeking our first full-time engineering hire to help us build robust, thoughtful features to power our core product offering.
We're led by an experienced executive team (and board) that's lived the full startup life-cycle from inception through exit together several times over, including extensive experience in the e-commerce space (both in platforms and as hands-on store operators).
We're a fully capitalized incorporated business with several years of runway.
Your Background
The ideal candidate will see an exciting opportunity to grow and contribute as a pragmatic, thoughtful developer, eager to make a substantial imprint on an early product.
We're a small group, and this is a rare hire for us so we're seeking an outstanding fit from someone who embraces the opportunity to serve as a full-stack generalist, with the accompanying expectations of initiative, trust, teamwork, camaraderie, and accountability (which exists among our entire team).
We envision a more senior developer in this role, ideally with some background in related fields (e-commerce, B2B financing), opinionated but open-minded, embracing high standards for their work. We're open to those seeking opportunities to move towards leadership roles as we grow, or happy to be solid contributors. We're also open to earlier-career candidates with the right enthusiasm and smarts. We want the right person, not a fixed career template.
We know that everyone has a different life journey (some of us got our degrees in the humanities, some made late career pivots -- there's no cookie-cutter blueprint for a successful developer), so we look forward to hearing your story of how you've arrived where you are.
We seek candidates with high attention to detail, able to roll with the inevitable changes that come from a startup in a dynamic industry. Since we expect to be growing at a healthy clip, a mindset for pragmatism, with a constant eye on process improvements, refactoring and scale considerations is an important trait that we all embrace.
Our Current Stack
- Ruby and Rails (staying up-to-date on each), Webpacker/ES6, React, PostgresQL, Redis;Heroku hosted infrastructure (for now), Sqreen, Auth0, Sidekiq;AWS Dynamo DB
- Key integrations: Amazon MWS API, Dwolla ACH/Customer management, Plaid
Key Job Requirements - these are closer to the dealbreakers:
- Excellent written communication skills. Everyone says this, but it's really key for us. Communicating well, clearly and effectively has effects on team velocity, product quality and team morale. We need people who value and can practice outstanding communication skills.
- Comfort and experience with Ruby and the Rails framework. It's not the hotness it once was, but we've stayed in love with its core beliefs: prioritizing developer happiness, code aesthetics and minimalism, thoughtful conventions over configurations, and efficient web-based software growth. You don't have to have spent the MAJORITY of your years with Rails, but you should appreciate it and want to spend more time with it. We use it as our customer-facing app API, and our as our full-stack backend/internal app.
- A healthy respect for high code quality and test coverage, but a pragmatic sensibility that guides you to ship features often. Our philosophy is to avoid tech debt when possible, but also avoid the over-engineering of solutions that prevent us from shipping frequently.
- Fluency with Javascript/ES6 and the React framework (and Material UI kit), which we use for our customer-facing portal.
- Handling financial transactions and sensitive data. We're FinTech, so we take our responsibility seriously. You should have demonstrable experience with high security/standard environments and practices.
- A pragmatic mindset coupled with high standards for work and an ability to thrive autonomously across the product development lifecycle: from requirements gathering to coding to testing.
We're a startup, and we're here to help each other out, but each individual needs to have a mindset of being self-driven, curious, thorough and accountable.
Skills that aren't entirely critical, but which will definitely catch our eye:
- Experience with e-commerce platforms (Amazon MWS, Shopify API), core concepts, API's and/or data structures
- Experience with lending, finance/financial accounting or ledger software paradigms and use cases, KYC laws and conventions.
- FinTech-specific API or platform experience, including Dwolla (ACH) and/or Plaid API platforms
- Experience with AWS/cloud services such as DynamoDB and Redshift, and usage in supporting/reporting tools to the primary app.
- Database performance tuning, with a focus on performant and dynamic querying and data aggregation.
Roadmap and Areas of Focus
Here's a glimpse at some of the areas we're likely to focus and work on in the coming year. Any could be fair game for our engineering team:
- Customer onboarding (including Amazon store connection and performance analysis, lending regulation validation, banking connection)
- Customer financing management (requests, review, underwriting and approval)
- Financing tracking and payment scheduling and processing
- Lending eligibility and underwriting
- Additional e-commerce and 3rd Party Logistics platforms
- Store performance insights and analytics
- Internal-facing BI reporting and analytics tools
- Scaling (both within our core environment in Heroku and leveraging sensible AWS/Cloud services)
Our Philosophy
We come from high-quality, customer-focused organizations. Customers are appreciated, and reminded of that in all interactions, including the occasional ones with our product team. The lasting success of our company comes from our customers and team members feeling valued and connected.
We want a team that wants to stick with us over the long haul, so the norm is NOT to work nights and weekends- you need time to be a human and recharge and refresh. While startups are dynamic and high energy, heroics are rarely deployed, we value product stability and calm interactions. We have the leadership experience to lead with this balance in mind.
We also believe that diversity (of people, thought and experience) is an asset, and makes us a stronger, more inclusive team. We don't discriminate based on age, sex, race/ethnicity, sexual orientation, religion, gender identity, disability, veteran status or any other basis protected by law.
We offer competitive base compensation, with equity options plus full health benefits, and flexible work location opportunities. As we continue to grow the business, we're committed to continuing to invest in benefits for our team.
We're based in Austin, TX, but are well-equipped to work as a distributed product team, so remote candidates are welcome to apply. We're flexible on work schedules, but require that you be able to overlap at least 6 hours daily with the US Central Time zone during normal working business hours.
Written communication skills become essential to make sure we're communicating clearly and efficiently.
Next Steps
Please attach a resume and write-up a brief note / cover letter (3-4-ish paragraphs) introducing yourself, what you're looking for in a position, and what specifically resonates with you about Onramp and what we've described here.