Senior Backend Engineer — Remote
TLDR
At Rise, we are on a mission to help teams get more important work done. We do that by building a calendar that gives teams more time to focus on what matters.
We're experienced people, have built companies before and we've raised $3M from top tier investors like Stewart Butterfield (founder Slack), Adriaan Mol (founder Messagebird, Mollie), Tuomas Artman (Linear) and Lachy Groom.
We're focussed on doing great work and letting you do just that. We're distributed, do almost everything async and are super flexible about when we work (we're all parents of young kids so you can probably find us on the playground whenever we're not working).
We'll offer a competitive salary in the range of €80 – 120k plus stock options.
About Rise
We are on a mission to help teams get more important work done.
Read more
The team
Dany – Front-end Engineer from Berlin
Daniel – Back-end Engineer from Cologne
Willem – Back-end Engineer & Cofounder from Amsterdam
Rick – Front-end Engineer & Cofounder from Amsterdam
Emiel – Design & Cofounder from Amsterdam
We're a mix of people with different experiences, ranging from early stage startups, big tech, founding companies and fresh from university.
We've worked at companies like Uber, Tidal, Superlist, managed big teams and started and built multiple companies before.
We like to build a small team with very skilled people rather than adding a lot of positions. We believe with the right people you are able to move faster.
Things you should know about the team
01
Willem worked at Uber where he was responsible for large parts of the payments infrastructure and built the Amsterdam team from 7 to 220 engineers in 5 years. He once caused a bug that cost Uber tens of millions. You should ask him about the story there when you're interviewing.
02
Rick wrote Grip, a book about productivity, which sold around ~100k copies in over 6 languages.
03
Dany is a big fan of tailwind and built tailwind-merge that solves the pains of using Tailwind CSS in a design system. This is being dowloaded 90k times per week now.
04
Rick and Emiel worked together for more than 3.5 years at the Dutch startup Blendle where Rick was CPO. Few years later they worked together on the Dutch Covid Notification app that led to the idea of building Rise together.
How we work
We care deeply about having a great sense of flow. We do that by having everyone own projects and having maximum amount of time to focus deeply on tackling the work. In clear terms: not too many meetings.
That said, killing meetings is not our goal. Our goal is simply to build the best possible product, which means that we like one-on-ones for catching up, ad-hoc meetings to flesh out details and real time polishing of details by sharing screens and code.
We run two week cycles, defined in Linear. We have a cadence of three team meetings per week: a kickoff on Monday, a weekly team lunch on Wednesday and a demo on Thursday or Friday.
We have been sending investor updates since the very beginning of building Rise, which contain our key metrics, financials, insights and plans. All of that is transparent for everyone in the team.
All of this is there for one reason: to allow everyone in the team to spend as much time as possible on building a world-class product.
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Job description
The Rise backend powers our frontend on one side, and integrates with downstream calendar providers like Google Calendar on the other. Additionally we've built a scheduling engine that can instantly rank and score timeslots for our Find a Time feature. The initial backend is built with a Heroku/Ruby/PostgreSQL/Redis/Sidekiq stack. We are looking for a senior backend engineer to help launch and scale the Rise product.
What you'll be working on
As an early engineer you'll work on many different aspects of the product. A few examples:
Collaborate with our client team to define a scalable and extensible API
Dive deep into our event scheduling engine to improve performance or extend the capabilities
Optimize our development workflow (for example making the first-time local setup for new hires easier, to setting up a staging environment, improve our build pipeline)
Evaluate and utilize new libraries, frameworks and and tooling
Involvement in hiring and onboarding of new engineers
What our ideal candidate looks like
Significant experience in building distributed, scalable, performant and asynchronous backend applications in the cloud (AWS, GCP, etc)
Significant experience with at least one scripting language, preferably Ruby 💎
Cares a lot about high quality, readable, structured object oriented code. Advocates best practices and architecture patterns. Is able to make trade-offs between extensibility, optimization and execution speed. Empowers others by reviewing code.
Proficient with different types of testing (integration, unit, stress, etc)
Experience with system observability: automates eyes and ears throughout the stack with tooling (Grafana, New Relic, Sentry, etc). Familiarity with incident handling is a plus.
Has a habit of being paranoid about security and privacy (input validation, network encryption, authentication, authorization)
Is autonomous, able to independently pick up tasks and full projects and work through them end-to-end
Is product and user minded: is always focused on how their work will impact or optimize the experience of Rise users
We realize that as a founding team we're from similar backgrounds, that we have unconscious biasses and that we have work to do here. This is why we explicitly want to invite and encourage people from underrepresented groups to apply.
What we're offering
Salary in the range of €80 -120k plus stock options
M1 MacBook Pro, 5K display (if needed) and AirPods Max
Work remotely, no commute to the office
Paid co-working space if required
Around 3/4 onsites per year to do fun stuff and/or build
Applying
Interested and ready to Rise? We'd love to jump on a call with you.
Share your CV, or even better: send a video of something you've built. If you cannot share this in a video we can also discuss it later. Email your CV/video/questions to willem@risecalendar.com or @wspruit at Twitter (DM's are open).