Software Engineer, macOS - remote

TL;DR

• Build the API and backend infrastructure for our extensions store
• Small team that is light on processes
• Fully remote (EU-friendly timezones)
• Backed by great investors (Y Combinator, Accel, Chapter One and top angels)
• Modern perks (MacBook Pro with 5k display, co-working space, monthly health benefit, ...)

Description

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.

Our stack

• JavaScript/TypeScript for the web. So far, most of our web development happened on our marketing website. We're open to adopt new technologies for the store where applicable. For now, we use Vue.js with Gridsome for our website and deploy it with Vercel. Our middleware is a simple Node.js app written with Express and hosted on Heroku.
• Swift for our macOS app. Everything is written in Swift using AppKit with Swift Packages. We don't use SwiftUI because it's too premature for rapid development. We rarely adopt third party dependencies. Some are GRDB for our database, Sentry for crash reporting, Nuke for image fetching and a few C libraries to crank up performance.
• Modern work tools for everything. Linear for issue tracking, GitHub as source control, Sentry for error reporting, Segment and Amplitude for analytics, Slack for internal communication, Figma for pixels, Notion as knowledge base and a few others. As a team, we enjoy using CleanShot, Bear, Things and more Mac apps.

What we offer

• We're at beginning of our next chapter. You will join us at the right time to have major impact on the future of the company. We released Raycast 1.0, established a friendly community and are jumping head first into building a platform for productivity tools.
• We're backed by great investors. We're backed by Accel, Y Combinator, Chapter One and angels such as Charlie Cheever (Co-Founder of Expo &Quora), Calvin French-Owen (Co-Founder of Segment), Zach Holman (Early GitHub engineer) and more.
• We're individual contributors at heart. We value full ownership and responsibility, choose quality over quantity and put our users first. We're motivated by shipping truly great software.
• We'll treat you well. Get a competitive salary, equity and health insurance. Plus, we provide a monthly health benefit for a gym, pay for your coworking space, give you a MacBook Pro with 5K display and accessories and provide 25 days of paid-time off (PTO) plus all national holidays.