Technical Lead - remote

Raisely
Posted 2 years ago
Raisely powers online fundraising for ambitious charities across the world. We’re a purpose-driven remote team, spread across 6 countries and 11 cities.

We’re growing rapidly, but we’re not just any high-growth startup. Here you’ll have the flexibility of working from wherever you’re happy, supported by a passionate, talented team. You’ll use your skills to help charities of all sizes raise money to fund their important work, all while building a well-balanced company that puts values first.

If you’re excited about the challenge of a high-growth startup, and want your work to have a huge impact on the world, then we hope you’ll consider working with us.

A bit about us:

We’re Raisely! We help charities raise money online. Our platform helps charities build fundraising campaigns, run donation appeals, and nurture their supporters. We make it easy to get started and scale-up, without needing technical help.

We started Raisely because charities have been underserved by technology for too long. We set out to change that, and so far we’ve helped raise over $200m.

We’re a team of 20-turning-40 as we rapidly grow our company (and impact). With your help, we’re hoping to raise $1bn in the next few years and rapidly scale out, supporting charities small and large in countries across the world.

Oh and one more thing. We walk this impact talk. We’re a proud B-corp, and purpose is baked into our constitution. We’re carbon neutral, and we’re starting our anti-racism journey to ensure we’re actively undoing centuries of systemic racism.

We know with diversity comes strength. We want Raisely to be a team of many cultures, nationalities, sexualities, gender identities, religious beliefs, abilities, and ideas. We particularly encourage Indigenous people, First Nations, people from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds, people with disabilities, or people without the economic advantage of higher education, to apply for our roles.

Raisely is a unique product with many interesting technical aspects. At a glance:
  • Raisely lets people take one-off and recurring donations to their own Stripe/PayPal accounts. We cover reporting, storage, and handling fraud prevention/security.
  • Raisely has a comprehensive page-builder that our customers use to build their own fundraising websites. We supply a set of React components, campaign templates and page-building constructs. But we also allow our customers to write their own SCSS styles and custom React components, which means our engineering team supports a lot of permutations and customisation.
  • Raisely tries to cover all the core needs of a fundraiser. Our product covers page building, CRM, fundraising management and marketing automation. Our engineering team has the task of balancing the need to realise our ambitions while managing increasing complexity of our codebase.
  • Raisely needs to operate at an ever increasing scale. We already facilitate millions of API requests each day, and expect that to continue growing exponentially.

A bit about the role:

We’re looking for a Technical Lead / Technical Coach to lead part of our engineering efforts.

Managing one of our two product teams, you’ll apply your deep technical expertise to Raisely. You’ll manage a small, passionate team of three engineers and work closely with our designers and product managers to bring impactful improvements to our product.

Every day you’ll be solving interesting technical problems, mentoring your team, and helping our charity customers raise millions of dollars for the wellbeing of people and planet.

In terms of tech, we mostly work in JavaScript. Our API forms the backbone of our application and is built with Node + Postgres. Around it are a number of microservices, and two large React applications for our admin panel and fundraising website architecture.

We’re looking for someone for this role with senior technical experience. You should be comfortable architecting applications and deeply understand data structures, application security and testing/tooling. You should have some experience mentoring other engineers (even if you haven’t managed a team before). You’ll be a significant individual contributor yourself, alongside coordinating your team.

This is a full-time, permanent role. Raisely is 100% remote company, you will be able to work from home or a co-working office.

Role: Permanent, full-time (38hrs/week)
Location: Remote (we’ll help you set up your home office!)
Timezone: Substantial overlap with Australian east-coast business hours.


If you worked here over the past few months, you might have:

  • Worked with your team to scope out the addition of PDF receipts to the Raisely application, covering new database models, front-end changes, a new microservice, and delayed processing on a worker.
  • Reviewed the performance of a recent deployment in production, to ensure the code is running efficiently and correctly.
  • Run 1-on-1s with your team to provide feedback and help them grow in their roles.
  • Read over PRs from within your team. Send them to production when they worked great, and suggested improvements where they made sense.
  • Help out with a technical support question that has come via the support team and needs stepping through the code to understand
  • Reviewed the process of our current feature with the whole Product, Engineering and Design team
  • Dived in and coded out a slice of a new feature to unblock your team
  • Be willing to jump in and investigate if our monitoring alerts us that the production service is experiencing higher than usual latency
  • Improve anything. Your job description doesn’t end with these bullet points.

Now about you....

You’re an experienced engineer in your own right. You’ve worked across whole applications before, and have a knack for architecting simple technical solutions to complex problems. Experience with React/Node is a plus, but not required as long as you’ve worked with similar languages (Ruby, Go, Python etc).

You lift others up
You’re excited by the opportunity to manage and grow your own team. You are ready to teach other engineers and help them grow. You’re comfortable giving feedback, and great at nutting out a problem with a colleague.

You own your work
We want you to be excited by the opportunity to be an owner here. You take things in your stride, and love what you build. You ensure everything your team builds works well and you love to see things through. You don’t leave things to be someone else’s problem.

You ship code
You understand that we’re not helping our customers do incredible things until our code is shipped, and so you’re pragmatic. You can identify the right areas of code to polish, and when something just needs to get the job done.


You care about making a difference
Yeah, we’re all here because we want to make the world better (and by that we mean a carbon-neutral utopia with world peace and just laws, where all people are treated the same with equal opportunity to thrive). So you’ve gotta want that too!


Ok, and why work with us?

You spend nearly 2000 hours of your life at work, each year. That’s a huge commitment, so we can promise that every hour you’re spending with Raisely, you’re making the world a better place. Pretty great perk, hey?

Plus, the more you help us grow, the bigger our impact gets. And by that we’re talking hundreds of millions of dollars big.

Working at Raisely is unique. If you have a great idea, we’ll help you make it happen. You'll play a pivotal role in the success of hundreds of fundraising campaigns on our platform, and help shape our company as we grow.

If you needed more convincing, here’s the rest of it:

💵 Salary – We try to pay competitive salaries anchored to Sydney, Australia. This role pays AU$143,000 a year. (Including super for Australian residents)

🏥 Healthcare – We will contribute up to US$3000 towards health insurance if you live in the US.

📈 Ownership – We are focussed on building Raisely as a team, so we’ll offer you the chance to be a part-owner of the company with our Employee Share Options

💻 Technology – The usuals. We’ll get you a laptop and screen when you start, plus help you set up your home office.

✈️ Retreats – Every 6-ish months we fly you somewhere pretty for our team retreats. (Once we’re able to safely again)

🗺 Annual Leave – Everyone gets 4 weeks paid leave plus 11 days of public holidays, to be taken when you like. Plus, you are entitled to generous paid sick leave.

🌴 Work remotely – We’re a remote-first company - live and work wherever you’re happiest. We’ll cover a co-working space if you’d like to work there.

Flexibility – We’ll work with you to figure out hours that work with you, and we’re flexible when life gets in the way.

😌 Calm Company – ⅓ of us are parents, another ⅓ are parents to fur babies, and the other ⅓, well, they have lives too, so we strive to respect each others personal time.

🤷 Training – We’ll support you with time when you want to learn new skills or pay for conference or course tickets.


How to apply:

You’ve got this far! We really want to hear from you. To apply, email jobs@raisely.com with your CV and cover letter. Use the subject line “Technical Lead”.

If you need assistance and/or a reasonable accommodation due to a disability during the application or the recruiting process please request that accommodation in your application.

In your cover letter, include short answers to the following:
  • What is it about this job that made you want to apply?
  • Talk us through a recent project you led! What was the problem you needed to solve? How did you architect a solution? How did you coordinate with your team? What would you do differently if you started again?
  • What do you think good management looks like, for engineers?
  • We are accepting applications on a rolling basis until we find the right person.