Full Stack Engineer
Seneca Systems is looking for a passionate full-stack 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
Both cofounders are engineers and philosophy majors who care deeply about architecture. While "it works" is a necessary property of any feature, it is far below our bar to ship. We're focused on taking the time to build a stable platform that can evolve to serve the full range of government needs. Our business depends on it and we wouldn't have it any other way.
Romulus, our CRM platform for local governments, is written in Ruby (riding on Rails) although we have fallen in love with Elixir and are thinking about using it for most future services. Our front end is written primarily in ES6 and ES7 on top of Ember. We use PostgreSQL with PostGIS to handle a variety of geo-spatial needs.
You are looking for:
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A culture of open source
We use tons of open source at Seneca Systems and we like sharing back with the community. From writing documentation and fixing bugs to open-sourcing projects we have developed, we believe in giving back. We also believe that open sourcing functionality forces us to write better code, more documentation, and reduce the problem to its core abstractions.
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Engineers that care about quality
We want to build the foundation for representative democracy. That isn't something you can just hack together. Architecture, modularity, and developer happiness aren't just part of our process, they're part of who we are.
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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.
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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:
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Building modular services in Ruby and JavaScript (and soon Elixir)
Romulus is a CRM for local government. We're initially focused on helping local representatives manage requests from their citizens. This involves syncing with 311 systems, collaborating across departments, and building detailed analytics around constituent interests.
To support future development, we have pulled out multiple services including communications (email/texts) and a generic 311 api. As we grow, additional modules on top of Romulus will need self-contained functionality. You'll help build this to scale for hundreds of thousands of users, millions of constituents, and many happy developers.
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Owning feature development from start to finish
From data migration to front-end styling, you'll have the freedom and responsibility to build out full features. Some days that means Ember components and templates, other days you might be building a new service to handle geo-spatial searching.
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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 engineering workflow. We respect honesty and are in this together.
Candidate sketch:
- 3+ years of experience in web development.
- 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 your 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: $140,000 base
Equity: 90,000 option grant (approximately .81% of the company)