Sr. Backend Engineer (Ruby) - remote

Daybreak Health
Posted 2 years ago
About Daybreak

Daybreak Health (www.daybreakhealth.com) is building the leading digital mental health system for youth. Our mission is to create a world where every young person benefits from mental health support.


Our mental health system removes all barriers to effective care for young people: we create easy access through our school and pediatrician partners, deliver effective care through evidence-based online therapy that is integrated with technology, and bring consumer cost to zero through our funding partnerships with government agencies and health insurance. Over the next 5 years we plan to serve more than 25 million youth who need mental health support.


The Team


As a team
, we are all aligned with our North Star mission. We collaborate and execute incredibly well by doing more with less (we value efficiency and output over hours worked!) and we communicate clearly using writing (vs. unnecessary meetings). We are fully remote with team members across the country, and will stay that way. We value mental health: the willingness to be vulnerable is a requirement to join Daybreak (for example by communicating when we make mistakes). We have regular mental health days (at least once per quarter!). Last but not least, we value fun and hold regular virtual and in-person activities.


The Business


We’re a YC-backed company that raised its Seed from Maven Ventures and just raised our Series A from a Top 10 VC (announcement coming soon). We’re a rocketship, with our revenue more than tripling between July and November of 2021, and more acceleration in sight. We’re hiring for critical roles now to expand nationally and have an even bigger 2022.

The Job

You'll be the fourth Engineer on a twelve person team and will work directly with the CTO.


Your onboarding will consist of a handful of bug fixes and tech debt iterations. After which you’ll join the rest of the team on the core project: Building out our own bespoke EHR. Turns out you can’t really buy something for what we need.


You will work directly with the CTO to draft Technical Proposals and implement the backend components defined within them. This process will allow you to define not only the details of the solutions we implement but the timelines on which we implement them. Over time you will take ownership of some of existing systems and many new systems and be looked to as the Subject Matter Expert (SME) on them by both the CTO and Product.


In order to be capable of this work we expect that you will be extremely skilled at data schema design, API design, documentation writing &automated testing.


You are expected to have opinions on workflow engines, feature toggles and asynchronous processing. You are not expected to be a microservices wiz, a DevOps Ninja or a full time DBA.


From time to time you will be asked to help with some jr level frontend features, but you are not expected to be a full stack developer.


Lastly, you will help Engineering as a whole to deliver on our Technical Vision, which, if lived up to, we believe will provide the opportunity for the business to succeed.


We generally believe this job is doable by someone with three to five years of industry experience composed of at least two recent years of Ruby on Rails experience.


Compensation

  • Base Salary: 80-140k
  • Equity: 30,000 to 10,000 shares, 5 year vesting, 1 year cliff for 20%
  • Vacation: 3 weeks minimum, unlimited policy.

Growth Opportunities


While we're a small company, we're on a growth path and can help you grow your skills. Depending on your interests and the growth of the company we can help you pursue one of the following growth paths:

  • Progress to Full Stack Engineer
  • Progress to a certified Salesforce Engineer

Tech Stack

  • Ruby on Rails v6.0.3 (Rails Backend), PostgreSQL, Redis, RSpec
  • React Native v0.64.1 (Daybreak Mobile), React JS v17.0.2 (Web Frontend), TypeScript, Jest
  • Salesforce

The Engineering Org

Daybreak Engineering is kinda nuts. We allocate time for tech debt. We run a Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC) that allows us to set our own deadlines for projects. We measure our productivity in both tickets punched and business value delivered. We're constantly looking for ways to buy solutions to our problems rather than build them. We understand that Software Engineering isn't just programming, it's programming plus time. We believe that it is worse to build the wrong thing than to build nothing at all. We are proactive instead of reactive.


We know where we're going, and we believe that through good faith debate we can get there. Check out our Technical Vision here for more: Technical Vision 2021-09-02


As a member of the Engineering Team you can expect:

  • To spend less than five hours in meetings most weeks.
  • To be given projects fit for your level of experience in addition to normal plumbing.
  • To engage in good faith debate centered on how to build the tech required to achieve our mission.
  • To be invited into the business side of things and help identify and solve problem(s) across the org through both systems thinking AND software.

A Typical Day @ Daybreak Engineering

  • Start your day at whatever hour works best for you
  • Submit your Geekbot standup update by 10:15am PST
  • Attend standup at 10:15am PST via zoom
  • Do your work
  • End your day whenever you feel is appropriate (guidance available if that helps you)

  • The Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC) @ Daybreak

  • Product draws up a Product Requirements Doc (PRD) by working with Clinical, CS/Ops or Growth to identify areas of improvement for the business.
  • Eng weighs in on the PRD giving it a T-Shirt Size (Eg. Minutes to Hours, Hours to Days, Days to Weeks, Weeks to Months, I don't know) [Link to understanding PRD]
  • Product decides whether the PRD is worth further evaluation based on Eng's T-Shirt Size
  • Eng dives into the PRD and draws up a Technical Proposal that explains, at key:value and class name granularity, how this thing will be built.
  • Eng reviews the technical proposal internally to ensure it's something we'd be proud to build and not a steaming pile of tech debt.
  • Eng creates actionable tickets with tripartite estimates for all proposed work. Tickets are then collected into groups that each form a distinct, standalone, piece of business value.
  • Eng presents the groups &estimates to Product for final scoping.
  • Product descopes groups of work to meet timelines then green lights a specific body of work
  • Eng signs off on the build as described and gets coding

  • Hiring Process

    Daybreak's hiring process aims to be doable in about six hours end to end spread across a calendar week.

  • 30 minute screener call with CTO
  • Code Challenge - 1.5 hours 
  • The Code Challenge is done in a single sitting in your web browser via Qualified.io. It is timed, but you won't be working in front of people. We're trying to see how you program, not how you deal with social pressure.
  • Technical Proposal Drafting Challenge - 1 hour 
  • We're a document heavy company. You will be writing a lot and so we need to understand how you approach writing about technical topics.
  • Video Interview (Final) - 3 hours 
  • At this point we trust that you could do the work, we just need to get to know you a bit better and see if you can bring something unique to the team. The interview itself is broken into three parts, one with CEO, one with COO and one with CTO + Lead Frontend Eng.