Software Developer/Engineer at Fun Ecom Co | Remote &Flexible Hours

 

- Do you enjoy improving processes and making people’s lives easier through automation?

- Do you like coding for long stretches of time without interruption?

- Do you thrive in a high-stress environment filled with political infighting, bureaucracy, and corporate nonsense?

If so, then we are the place for you, except you might hate how nice of a company we have - filled with happy, generally competent people that don’t put up with jerks. Frankly, it makes me sick how nice everyone is.

We are remote full time, have very flexible hours, people are judged by their output, not by how much they suck up to the boss, and turnover is super low because the company believes that happy employees = happy customers = happy bank account. Simply disgusting, if you ask me.

Yup! Amazingly enough, we actually paid money to post this on a bunch of different job sites. And it’s not even a pyramid scheme! Plus, get this: the owner just started paying our 30+ employees with money instead of Pizza Hut coupons - we’re big time, people.

Our careers page is actually worth checking out to learn more about how insane we are:

http://www.jlstradingco.com/careers/

Our business involves taking random products and then marketing the heck out of them, primarily on Amazon. We have hundreds of SKUs at the moment and are launching around 10-20 new products every single month. A small sampling:

Bad Parking Cards (http://amzn.com/B01HLGZRCQ)

Cable Tie Mounts (http://amzn.com/B06XNBS6TG)

K2-D3 Capsules (http://amzn.com/B07C451MZ9)

We want to launch as many products as we can. Our business is growing rapidly every year, and it’s our intention to continue that for as long as possible, which means we need good people to help us keep up with the growth.

1. Full Time Remote/Flexible Hours. You will be working from home in your pajamas, on your schedule. And we don’t care if you work 10 hour days 4 days a week or want to catch up on the weekend. So long as you put your hours in and get your work done, we’re happy.

2. Complete Work/Life Balance. If you’re routinely working more than 45ish hours, you’re gonna get a friendly talking-to. We want you to be operating at 100% capacity, which means that you need to rest.

3. You Can Be Yourself. You don’t have to put on a fake, professional face. You can just be yourself. You can talk smack to the CEO, and no one will think anything of it.

4. We Are Committed to Good Development Principles. We are early days in software development, but the CEO has been the de-facto engineer for a long time, so we understand the maker vs manager schedule and intend to pass the Joel Test.

5. Strongly Anti-BS. Anybody in the company can (and is expected to) tell the CEO when he is wrong. There are no bureaucratic or BS rules getting in the way of getting work done.

6. No Micro-Management. Once you’re trained and have demonstrated you know your stuff, we are pretty hands-off. In fact, if you need external management to stay on-task and motivated, we probably aren’t the place for you.

7. Supportive Environment. We don’t operate via intense stress or unreasonable top-down deadlines. Everyone wants you to be successful – internal politics are at a minimum here.

8. No Toxic People Allowed. We try very hard to screen out mean people before they get in, but in case they slip through, we fire them quickly. Imagine never having to interact with toxic people at work - how nice would that be?

9. We’ll Invest in Your Training. We want you and everyone to get better constantly. You’ll be learning new things all the time, and are strongly encouraged to invest time every day to learn new things, improve your system/work process, and just generally try to make your life easier.

10. Four Weeks Vacation. We 100% want you to recharge, so having plenty of time off is absolutely worth it.

See here: http://www.jlstradingco.com/careers/

Yes, those are legitimately our values. The careers page is definitely worth checking out - it’s not just normal corporate BS. We promise you’ll learn a lot about us.

Super short version:

Developing really good internal tools/webapps so that other people’s lives are easier. You’ll help to understand the process and produce a solution that balances internal customer needs with the realities of software development.

Here is a bulleted list of responsibilities:

- Understand the underlying process/problem deeply

- Work with other people in the company to brainstorm solutions

- Propose/decide on a solution

- Build the tools, as you see fit

- Work with the rest of the team to test it

- Support the software/train someone else to support it if possible

You’re going to be able to participate and even drive the software development life cycle (SDLC) from beginning to end. This is a true green field.

Like everyone else in the company, you will also need to innovate regularly - which means figuring out ways to improve quality and production speed.

It is challenging, but fun work that’s going to require a lot of time and task management, problem-solving, and a reasonable amount of people skills.

We honestly don’t know the market price for this role. We can’t beat the FAANGs of the world, but we are very reasonable people and intend to be competitive.

This is a green field opportunity. There are no legacy issues whatsoever - you’ll be the person creating legacy issues for future devs! involved in design, architecture, implementation, deployment, and testing. 

The biggest is our Inventory Management System, which has really good internal logic and works well but.... it’s built in Google Sheets (kill me now). You would be developing a webapp with multiple users that would track our inventory, manage our simple manufacturing process, create purchase orders for our vendors, and so on. It’s a lot, but I promise the internal logic is relatively simple - it’s just a lot of database calls in-effect. We have a lot more information available on this, so you’ll know what you’re getting into before you start.

Another example would be software that automatically pulls in our Amazon advertising data and applies logic to decide what to do with a given keyword or bid. We have the logic established and have people executing on it, but this makes way more sense as software.

Our ambition is to be a giant company. We believe our internal Inventory Management System is actually really darned good, but it’s totally constrained by it being in Google Sheets. We would like to eventually offer it (and our advertising solution) as a SaaS product, but that is definitely many steps down the road. We just want to make the point that this isn’t a dead-end job - we are 100% planning to grow this department.

This is definitely a role where we need you to come in with existing knowledge of full-stack software development. We will absolutely support you by paying for courses, giving you time to learn, and whatever else you think you need, but we don’t have the internal ability to offer you substantial development training.

You just need to be awesome, though a college degree can sometimes help demonstrate that to us.

This is a solo role for now, though you’ll be working with internal teams to discover needs and plan features and what have you. This is not a supporting role. We intend to grow the team long-term, particularly with our SaaS ambitions, but for now, this is a solo gig.

You’re starting from scratch here (100% green field), you’ll have the freedom and responsibility to choose the technologies deployed. We’ll support you and won’t force cheap/free tools on you. If you hate PHP, then let’s not use PHP.

We don't care which stack(s) you know, but you need to know the heck out of at least one.

You and the IRS both!

Please complete the following survey:

We promise to respond within 5-10 business days even if our answer is No.

There will be multiple steps in this process, FYI, including a written application, interviews with potentially a few different people, and work tests including a paid one. Hiring the right people is really hard and very expensive if we do it poorly, so we have to front-load the process. I'm sorry about that and thank you for sticking with us.

Once you’re in our pipeline though, I would anticipate giving you a final answer within a few weeks, depending on how it goes. We definitely don’t want to string you along, and as long as you do what we ask, we promise to tell you “yes” or “no”, and to not just ghost you (like everybody I match with on Tinder).

Thank you for your time and interest, and I hope we can work together soon!

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JLS Trading Co. provides equal employment opportunities (EEO) to all employees and applicants for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, national origin, age, disability or genetics. In addition to federal law requirements, JLS Trading Co. complies with applicable state and local laws governing nondiscrimination in employment in every location in which the company has facilities. This policy applies to all terms and conditions of employment, including recruiting, hiring, placement, promotion, termination, layoff, recall, transfer, leaves of absence, compensation and training.

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