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Front End Engineer

Seneca Systems is looking for a passionate front-end engineer. As an early member of the team, you will be afforded significant autonomy, equity, and room to grow with the company. We are driven by our values to build incredible software that runs local governments.

Note: Given the size of our team, we can only consider employees who are able to work out of our Redwood City, CA offices.

About our stack

We're a product-focused team building a platform that can evolve to serve the full range of local government needs. The foundation of this is Romulus, our CRM platform for local governments. The basics — handling constituent information — apply to every department. Other features, handling constituent requests or syncing with 311, are specific deparments (representatives, in this case.) You'll be architecting a flexible module structure for a configurable experience per customer.

Our front end is written primarily in ES6 and ES7 on top of Ember. As the first owner of the front-end, you will have significant autonomy to adapt any part of our front end.

You are looking for:

  • Significant Product Ownership

    The front-end engineering of Romulus is a critical and significant engineering piece of the overall product. As the first front-end engineer, you will be responsible for owning the front-end appliction. You will have the freedom and responsibility to architect a stable, configurable, and modular front end experience.

  • Engineers that care about quality

    We are building the software foundation for representative democracy. That isn't something you can just hack together. Architecture, modularity, testing, and developer happiness aren't just part of our process, they're part of who we are. If you tell us you need to take a week refactor something that you know will be a pain to develop around later, we will encourage you to do so.

  • People First Leadership

    We do not promote engineers into management positions simply because they are good engineers. We have found that true leadership, maturity, and communication skills are orthogonal to age or tenure and align our team structure accordingly.

    Our management philosophy is centered around helping maximize our employee's growth and success. If we focus on hiring people who believe in what we are doing, that will naturally translate into a better business.

  • A brilliant and passionate team

    We wholeheartedly believe in what we are doing. We understand that building the software foundation for representative democracy isn’t a problem that everyone is interested in and that’s okay. We’re looking for passionate individuals who love being surrounded by similarly dedicated peers, who want to push themselves and their team to be better human beings.

Your day-to-day will look like:

  • Visualizing complex data

    From geo-spatial searches to forecasting demographic trends to performance analysis, you'll be helping government officials turn data into policy and action.

    For example:

    • How responsive is a team to constituent requests? Let's say their mean time to resolution is 2 days. That could mean every request takes either 1 day or 3, or it could mean that 90% of requests are resolved in 36 hours and the other 10% languish for 5 days.

    • As a representative, we're organizing an event to teach elderly community members about technology. How many constituents within a geographic area care about both education and senior services?

      If we need 5 volunteers, where is the optimal location to hold the event to be as close as possible to a pool of constituents likely to volunteer? How do we best communicate this information on top of a map?

  • Building modular components

    Beyond the core constitutent data and account management of our CRM, individual departments have diverse needs. Romulus should be easily configurable to enable functionality on an as-need basis.

    For example, representatives may need our request/response functionality plus the ability to create/send to realtime mailing lists based on search criteria. Clerks departments may need the request/response functionality plus dynamic form generation, but not enable mailing lists. Permitting departments also need form generation.

  • Thinking about our long-term architecture

    We're serious about the long-term success of everything we build. In our short history, we have paused feature development multiple times to refactor. In the long run, we have never regretted it.

    You're encouraged to actively think about how we can improve all aspects of our front-end engineering workflow. Maybe that means rethinking how we do integration tests or the use of certain libraries to scale our product and engineering team. We respect honesty and are in this together.

  • Building beautiful product experiences

    "It works" doesn't reach our bar for a great experience. We trust your creativity and personality to reflect our love for our users in the features you build. In everything we do, we strive to do what is right, regardless if it is the 'easy' option.

Candidate sketch:

  • 3+ years of experience in front-end engineering (JavaScript or similar compile-to-js language.)
  • Living in the Bay Area or open to relocate. Our offices are in sunny Redwood City.
  • High potential. Whether you're 25 or 50, you want to grow you skills as an engineer.
  • Empathy. You care about people and want to learn how you can help them.
  • Self-awareness. You want to get better, which sometimes means identifying areas of weakness.

Compensation:

Salary: $125,000 base

Equity: 75,000 option grant (~.68% of the company)

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