Full Stack Engineer (1st Engineering Hire)

What's homie?

homie is a marketplace where you can discover and order from curated home chefs around you. and We want homie to be the 1-stop-shop for home chefs where they can earn a meaningful income doing what they love. With homie they can solely focus on preparing delicious food and let us take care of the rest - customer acquisition, packaging, logistics, customer support, payments, regulatory licenses.

The Role

As a Full Stack engineer, at homie you will be responsible for building delightful web experiences for our customers and home chefs across the country. You will also have complete ownership in evolving our backend infrastructure that power the wesbite, Android and iOS applications and internal tools. This role comes with a lot of ownership and will play a critical role in the success of homie (no pressure!)

Key Responsibilities:

1. Build new features that delight our customers and help our home chefs grow their own businesses
2. Own your code
3. Monitor, analyze, and iterate on features
4. You will be a key team member, helping to build out our consumer and home chef facing websites
5. Use analytics to identify areas of impact and new product ideas

Skills & Experience Required

1. Full Stack Background. Experience in any of Django, frontend JS frameworks (React, Vue, Next, etc) is a plus
2. Proficient in Python and modern web tech stack including HTML5, CSS3 and ES6
3. Proficient understanding of cross-browser compatibility issues and ways to work around them
4. Familiarity with build tools like Babel and Gulp
5. Knowledge of front-end optimization techniques and tools (e.g. YSlow, PageSpeed)
6. Proficient with Git
7. Handy with the shell and automation tools
8. 2+ years in a growth-stage or early-stage venture will be preferred
9. Credentials - the college you went to, degree you have DOES NOT matter

Traits we Look for in All Team Mates:

1. Supportive - especially when teammates are faced with new challenges
2. Empathy - Put themselves in the shoes of our customers and home chefs to craft a great experience
3. Candour - being straight up with what you think is right
4. Ability to disagree and commit - there will be times where the team might not go with a direction you were keen on - having the maturity and trust in your teammate to go with it will be important - this is really difficult to do in practice
5. Value clear, frequent communication
6. Are naturally curious and willing to take a step to learn something they don’t have experience in
7. Feel a great sense of responsibility to each other

What you get at homie:

We're a team of 2 right now - and will probably grow to 6-8 people in the next 6 months - so there's really no stakeholder management, no corporate BS and no politics. Just pure, fast paced execution.

Flexibility: We are okay with you working whatever hours you want, as long as isht is getting done.

Opportunity to Build Something from Nothing: If building something from scratch excites you - this role is perfect. There's no legacy code, no baggage - you get a clean slate and can build ground up.

Let's not build a company that we wouldn't want to work for in 10 years time. You will play a key role in growing the team going forward - you will heavily influence who gets hired and does NOT get hired (including your seniors/reporting managers). You have a chance to pick the kind of peers you have always wanted to work with and build the kind of company you would be proud to be part of.

Growth: Joining at this stage has the unique advantage you can grow as fast as the company grows. You will see more product shipped, more experiments tried out, learn more in 6 months than you would see in a big co in 6 years. If you are inclined to hit that steep learning curve running - this is your shot.

I've always thought of building a company as going on an epic journey, an adventure, surrounded by friends. We're going to be a small team for the foreseeable future, fighting against the odds. We hope that through this we can build friendships which we cherish for the long term. We don't burn out people (we believe burnout has less to do with the quantity/hours worked and more to do with the kind of work and context it's being done in). We give people space. We love real teams with real friendships forming. We understand the power of individual potential and proximity.

What’s the interview process like?

We’ll likely do a 30-minute phone call just to make sure we’re on the same page (get to know each other a bit, set expectations with respect to role, responsibilities, compensation). After that, we’d love to chat with you in-person & work on a process together that feels fair.

Generally, there are two options:

1. A formal but practical interview--no trick/puzzle questions. (3-4 hours)
2. Maybe there’s a third option we haven’t thought of--we’re open-minded :) (Amazing side projects are a big big plus)

Frequently Asked Questions

Has homie raised $$$?

Yes - we've raised a seed round - glad to share more over a call

How many people do you plan to hire?

We plan to grow the team a bit to around ~8 total people (+6) through the end of 2021

What is work/life balance like at your company?

We usually leave work around 7-8 PM to have dinner with friends or family. As a result of being an early stage startup, we wouldn’t want to hide this reality to prospective candidates: raw hours actually make a big difference in the impact we can make right now. This won’t always be the case but it is at present. So, often we find ourselves working later on in the evening, on rare occasions a weekend, but it’s mostly driven by personal ambition. We don’t have any expectations of anyone to do so.

Thoughts on Diversity and Inclusion?

At homie we are always looking to hire the best talent and recognise that diversity in our experiences and backgrounds is what makes us stronger. We're committed to maintain an equal gender ratio in each of our teams + open to LGBTQ and minority candidates.

Are you open to remote candidates?

We prefer candidates who are co-located. Since we're at a super early stage - we believe there's a magic that just can't be recreated with remote work - the sense of belonging, the sense of camaraderie, the serendipity of conversations. We're flexible with being co-located though: a flexible work from home policy is something which we could work out. If you're remote and interested - drop us a line and we'll see if there's a fit and something could be worked out.

Our cultural values are...

An abridged version

• Making users happy: our decisions, intention, results, and motivation stem from trying to please our users.
• Asynchronous communication: deep work requires large chunks of time so we try to communicate asynchronously to provide more time for deep work.
• Results driven: We do what we promised each other, customers, users, and investors. While effort is recognised, it’s not regarded equally. We care about what you achieve.
• Kindness: While being kind may not seem ruthlessly connected to outcomes, it does make work a lot more fun. We suspect that’s key to doing great work over a long period of time.
• Speed: We believe speed is a competitive advantage as a company. As companies get larger, they tend to get slower—we hope to decelerate that as much as possible. You should feel comfortable asking: “Could we do this faster?”