Backend Software Engineer - remote

Raycast

Posted 3 years ago

Raycast makes it simple, fast and delightful to control your tools. We're looking for a Software Engineer to join our small team to build, own and scale the distribution of Raycast extensions via a store that developers around the world can contribute to.

Raycast is a native Mac application with a significant focus on top-notch UI and interactions. We genuinely care about user experience, performance, privacy and ease of use. We had enough of dealing with slow and clunky tools. Raycast is our attempt to let you enjoy your daily workflows without all the distractions.

When Apple announced the App Store in 2008, the distribution of software changed over night. Suddenly, developers could reach millions of customers. We believe it's about time to change how developers discover and consume productivity tools. At the center of this, is a store full of Raycast extensions that people can share and manage or discover new ones from others. We need hungry engineers that architect and build this store to revolutionise how developers experience productivity tools with us.

We're a fully remote company and looking for candidates in the UTC timezone (London, Lisbon, Dakar, ...) ±3 hours. This position is for a full-time employment.

In this role you will...

Build the infrastructure of our store. You design a stable cloud infrastructure and backend architecture that is open for extension, and an API that other developers love to use. You're implementing the distribution of our extensions and work closely with macOS engineering where needed.
Co-own the product and work self-directed. We're a small team of individual contributors. Everybody has autonomy and responsibility. You work on features from ideation over release to maintenance and shape the roadmap of the product.
Shape the experience for contributors. The store is one piece of the puzzle. You generate ideas about how developers should add and maintain extensions. You optimise for ease-of-use for producers and consumers.
Improve performance and care about quality. You dogfood your own features with our nightly builds, respond to user feedback in our community and jump into performance profiling to make API calls fast. You automate tedious tasks. At best, directly in Raycast.
Wear many hats. In a small startup, we're all generalists. You might add a new page to our Vue.js website, set up infrastructure components, or write a blog post about a new feature.

You will be a great fit if...

You know how to build great APIs. Ideally, you've built and scaled APIs before and have a playbook to kickstart development with modern backend languages. You've worked with different types of data stores, and you know best practices around data modeling and access. Moreover, you can reason well about the tradeoffs of different programming languages and tech stacks without being dogmatic, f.e. decide if we should adopt GraphQL or REST.
You're highly productive while writing quality code. We release updates every 1-2 weeks. You can break down big projects in small deliverables. You care about the outcome and take a pragmatic approach to deliver it. You keep things simple and rather write more code than adopting a third-party dependency. You know when you want a code review or need to write tests.
You're product-minded. You have a sense for great user experience and feel when something is off. You work with continuous deployment and preview environments to get constant feedback and you have monitoring and analytics in place to quickly act when something unexpected happens. You're eager to optimize API responsiveness and dig deep when there is a need to resolve a tricky issue. You treat APIs as products and proactively iterate on them.
You put our users first. Throughout Raycast you find many little details. You pay attention to detail and provide our users a delightful experience. You can't stand bugs and don't shy away from user feedback.
You're an empathetic communicator. You treat technology as tradeoffs. You may be opinionated but you're not ideological. When disagreeing, you communicate thoughtfully your perspective and compromise when needed. You're thriving in a team environment and hold your colleagues accountable.

Application process

During our interview process, we want to make sure that both sides get a good understanding of what it feels to work together day-to-day. Our process contains a few steps:

Send us an engaging email. Tell us why you want to join Raycast and why you generally care about the problem we're solving. Make your first impression count. Share with us what excites you and how you envision your role at Raycast.

An intro call with the founders. Both parties get to know each other. You learn more about Raycast and can ask us any question. From our side, we want to understand what motivated you to apply.

Work on a real task. We want to demonstrate how it is to collaborate with the team. For this, we give you an assignment that we would actually build and create a shared Slack channel to communicate. We'll compensate you for the task.

Another video call to present your task. Time to show your work in a short video call with some of us. Expect some role-specific questions to better understand how you tick.

After the last step, we get back to you with a decision. In rare cases, we might ask you for another call.

Apply