Sr. Backend Developer (Full Stack)

Top Five Skills

Connects with the Mission

Wider Circle’s mission should be a significant factor in this person’s desire to consider the position. The right candidate will be a values-driven individual who immediately aligns with Wider Circle’s values, connects and compliments teammates, and demonstrates the appropriate passion within their own life.

Flexibility

Wider Circle is known for their consistency, passion, and flexibility to respond to member and customer needs. Candidates should prefer the types of processes, team dynamics, and velocity to thrive in this type of dynamic environment to address these evolving needs.

Seasoned Senior Developer

The candidate should have 8+ years of prior software development and architecture experience. They should be familiar working for a company and team of similar size, at a similar point in the company’s trajectory. They must be comfortable executing successfully on internal and external projects and pilots. They should have experience working with, mentoring, and/or leading a remote and geographically distributed team that includes offshore developers. They should be familiar with the end-to-end recruiting process of screening, interviewing, and onboarding the right resources in order to expand their teams. They should also be seasoned communicators, who are comfortable collaborating not only with internal tech team members, but also internal stakeholders in different parts of the organization, and third-party vendors and partners as well.

Breadth of Technical Knowledge

In order to effectively design and build software solutions, the candidate needs extensive back-end expertise, including support for both web and mobile front-ends. They should be fluent with platforms and languages such as NodeJS, Java, Amazon AWS, and Twilio. They must be familiar with project management tools, agile methodologies, and squad organizational structures, as well as branching strategies, continuous integration, and automated test frameworks. They should be capable of creating back-end architectures that are both scalable and optimized for performance. They should be experienced with APIs and third-party integrations, and synchronizing data between systems. In addition to designing systems and mentoring others, they will also be expected to write their own code, perform code reviews, and manage source code repository branches. They should also be able to manage sprints and backlogs, lead software design and architecture discussions, and champion for internal tech debt improvements.

Been There, Done That Attitude

We are looking for someone who has a proven track record of transitioning and improving products in small/medium startups to support the company’s scale. They should have experience evaluating trade-offs on build vs. buy, and maintaining original tools vs. creating next-generation solutions. The candidate should have a knack for reducing bottlenecks and manual processes in order to streamline development, increase velocity, and deliver solutions on time or ahead of schedule. They should have the confidence to take on tough engineering tasks and projects in alignment with Product Management and senior leadership, but without the need for constant oversight. And finally, they should be interested in an eventual team lead career path.

Responsibilities

• Designing and leading implementation on our next-generation products
• Architect backend systems across product areas (e.g. designing an ingestion pipeline, deploying a multi-tenant Next JS/Express app to render pages on AWS, and automatically revalidate in response to queued webhook handlers) and to lead the implementation of these projects within our Engineering team
• Build products across our stack (using Typescript, Node, and more) that enable our customers to create their own differentiated user experiences online
• Guiding and mentoring internal and external staff augmentation engineers, in a remote, distributed environment
• Working with the Product and Engineering management to scope and execute items on the product roadmap, and ensure that solutions are delivered on time and on budget
• Participating in the complete software development lifecycle from requirement definitions to deployment
• Working with stakeholders to understand their needs requirements, and translate them into working features and products
• Helping to expand the team over time by interviewing and training onshore and outsourced vendors
• Collaborating with the lead architect and other developers on the system design and architecture
• Working in an agile environment, including sprint planning, standups, retrospectives, and close coordination with squad leads

Requirements

• 8+ years of senior software engineering experience working

• Demonstrated ability to complete projects on time and on budget
• Detailed knowledge of contributing and leading software teams using agile based methodologies
• Experience screening, interviewing, and training candidates to grow and improve the team over time
• Strong technical skills to in architecture, design, and implementation tradeoffs, including:
• Back-end experience with SQL databases
• Experience building web APIs and endpoints
• Familiarity with Node JS, Python, Java or other backend/scripting languages
• Familiarity with Salesforce a plus
• Experience with AWS services and security configurations
• Experience with messaging queues and message brokers
• Experience with Twilio or other telecommunications platforms
• Experience with geospatial (GIS) computations at scale
• Is comfortable with ambiguity, and defining software architecture patterns that solve customer pain points
• Has been bitten by enough deployment and maintenance issues in back-end systems to be opinionated on how they should be built
• Strong written and verbal communication skills
• Ability to work effectively with all levels of the organization in a startup culture
• Experience with HIPAA compliance and security

Bonus

• If you’re an ex-founder
• If you’ve worked at an early-stage startup previously (Series A or earlier)
• If the startup that you worked at was based in SF, NYC, or LA
• Have experience with modern full-stack React frameworks like Next.js or Remix

Benefits

As a venture-backed company, Wider Circle offers competitive compensation including:

• Comprehensive health coverage including medical, dental, and vision
• 401(k) Plan
• Paid Time Off
• Employee Assistance Program
• Health Care FSA
• Dependent Care FSA
• Health Savings Account
• Voluntary Disability Benefits
• Basic Life and AD&D Insurance
• Adoption Assistance Program
• Training and Development

And most importantly, an opportunity to make the world a better place!