Humbly Confident Senior Full Stack Developer - remote

We build “You Need a Budget,” the best budgeting software and education resources around. (Those in the know call us YNAB, which is pronounced “why-nab.”) For more than a decade, people have been buying YNAB and then telling their friends what a difference it has made in their lives. Google us, or read some of our reviews on the app store, and you’ll see what we mean. We love building something that has a huge positive impact on people’s lives.

We have big plans for our entire app ecosystem, including our web app and API. All of those plans necessitate changes on our back-end that runs on Rails/Postgres and our front-end Ember app written in TypeScript. That’s where you come in! 

We have one overarching requirement when it comes to joining our team: our Cultural Manifesto has to really click with you. If you’re nodding emphatically while reading this, you’ll probably fit right in!

Of course, we have some firm* requirements too, like five years of full-stack professional web application development experience. For us this means you either know the server-side really well and have some client-side experience, or you’re an absolute expert on front-end development and have some server-side know-how.  

*Well, firm-ish. If you know you’re a great fit for this role but fall short of the five-year requirement, include a specific pitch with your application on why we should consider you anyway! How you pitch us is up to you, just make sure it’s short and creative. 

But first, let’s talk about life at YNAB, and then we’ll go into detail about what we’re looking for. 

Our developer team is about 25 people strong, and we frequently operate in cross-functional teams, so you’ll get to work with awesome people from all different roles in the company. 

Regardless of their varied interests, all of our developers have one thing in common: They are a joy to work with. You won’t find heated arguments and raised voices here. We save our competitive spirit for YNAB’s external competitors (or the occasional lively board game session), but internally we build up our teammates and celebrate their successes. We all love to program and solve problems in creative ways, and we regularly take time to geek out and show each other something cool we built or found to make our lives easier.

And of course, as a developer, you’ll work closely with our amazing designers. They have the awards (including at least one actual Emmy®) to prove they’re good at designing stuff. More importantly, they welcome feedback and suggestions during the development process and are happy to tweak an interaction if you tell them it will save you significant development effort. 

We strive hard to make working at YNAB a unique and fantastic experience (we’ve even been named Fortune’s #1 Best Small Company to Work For). We have a team full of truly exceptional people—the kind you’ll be excited to work with. Here’s how we operate:

YNAB appreciates, respects, and trusts the expertise and judgment of our developers. We empower them to do what they think is right. 

We also work collaboratively. We continuously seek the right amount of structure and unity necessary to maximize productivity. Where it makes sense, we designate someone to make a call. 

Even though our developers are right a lot, it's okay to make mistakes here. Exploration and calculated risks are vital to velocity and growth. We freely admit when we're wrong. If something doesn't go as expected, we learn, bounce back, and make corrections. 

You won't be alone;others will be there to help, review, reassure, and back you up. We own our processes and collective outcomes as a team.

We’re a distributed team, so you can live and work wherever you want, as long as it’s somewhere between the Pacific Time Zone (UTC-8) and the Central European Time Zone (UTC+1). Proximity doesn’t influence productivity. Just make sure you have a reliable internet connection.

We want everyone to have a full life outside of YNAB. We seldom work more than 40 hours per week. There have been rare occasions where things got a little crazy, and people logged some extra hours. But then they took additional time off to balance it all out. We work hard and smart, but we’re in this for the long haul;there’s no need to go crazy on the hours.

We want you to take vacation. In fact, we have a minimum vacation policy of three weeks per year. Five weeks feels about right (plus two extra weeks for Holiday break). It’s important to get plenty of downtime and get out and do something. We’ll look forward to seeing pictures of your adventures in our #office_wall Slack channel.

When the pandemic isn’t keeping us from traveling, we get the teams together once a year to catch up on spreadsheets and powerpoints in a Best Western conference room. Just kidding. So far, we’ve done Costa Rica, a gigantic cabin in the mountains, a beach house in the Outer Banks, a ranch in Montana, and most recently, Laguna Beach. We do really fun things at these retreats, but the highlight is inevitably just being together and having a blast.

We’re serious about helping you improve your craft. We budget for it (hey-o!). Think conferences, Lynda/Skillshare subscriptions, books, and dedicated time away from work to learn something new. We love to see our people grow.

If you are Stateside, we’ll set you up as a W2 employee. If you’re international, you’ll be set up as a contractor. We are already spread across the world: Switzerland, Scotland, Mexico, Brazil, Argentina, Germany, Canada, and all over the United States.

We offer excellent health, dental, and vision insurance for our US employees, where we cover 100% of the premium for you and your family. (No need to check your vision, you read that right, 100%. Although if you did need to check your vision, we’ve got you covered!)

We also have a Traditional and Roth 401k option. YNAB matches your contributions, up to six percent of your paycheck. Matches vest immediately. (Are you a personal finance junkie like our founder Jesse? He set up YNAB’s 401k to have the lowest fee structure possible, where all plan costs are paid by YNAB, not your retirement nest egg. The investment funds available are fantastic, passively-managed, ultra low-cost index funds. You’re not a PF junkie? Trust us, it’s awesome.)

We use a leading compensation data provider to set competitive and well-defined pay ranges for all of our positions. Your pay is the same no matter where you live, and our goal is to pay at or above the market rate in the United States. We consider raises every year and have a bonus plan based on profitability, which you’re in on from day one. YNAB wins, you win. That kind of thing.

If this sounds like your ideal environment, read on because now we want to talk about you. You will play a big, big part in building something easy and joyful to use that helps millions of people discover budgeting as an essential financial and life-planning tool. You will change lives. 

You’re a Full Stack developer with at least five years of experience building, shipping, monitoring, and maintaining SaaS apps at scale (not just websites). 

You’re an expert in at least one modern server-side framework (Rails, ASP.NET, Express, Django, etc).

Some client-side experience is required as a minimum, meaning you know enough HTML/CSS/some-client-side-framework to get stuff on the screen matching a designer’s spec. We work in small, cross-functional teams where you will likely find yourself responsible for implementation on both the back-end (Rails and Postgres), as well as the front-end (using Ember or Vue and written in TypeScript).

If your focus has been more on front-end development, then you're among the best of the best with a client-side framework such as Ember and also have some server-side depth.  

You’re not necessarily the “Ops” person where you work, but you certainly understand the infrastructure well enough to aid in architecting and maintaining scalable solutions. We host on Heroku, so experience there is a bonus, but experience with AWS or other popular IAAS/PAAS is just fine.

You’ll do things like help vet and improve our server-side layer, implement new features, integrate with third-party APIs, and shepherd our application. We might have conversations that start like this:

YNAB is an equal opportunity employer. We believe a diversity of backgrounds, beliefs, abilities, and experiences is critical to our success. We are passionate about creating a welcoming, supportive, and collaborative environment for all employees. All are encouraged to apply as we continue to grow a smart, experienced, and diverse team that loves working together to build something that matters.

P.S.  If this position isn’t right for you at this time, but you know someone else who might be interested, we’d really appreciate it if you passed this along!