Tech Stack

Our backend stack is Ruby on Rails with a healthy serving of background processing. We use Sidekiq at the moment, but we'd like to add Kafka to our stack. We deploy to AWS using Docker and Kubernetes and utilize many of their hosted services (like RDS for Postgres). We aren't a standard-issue Rails app. For example, we use gems like interactor and dry-rb to write high-quality test-driven code.

Responsibilities

• Work with the founding team shoulder to shoulder in building the new standard for notifications. This includes

  • Managing the backend code and infrastructure (which is code, too!). Figuring out new ways to ship faster and more reliable updates.

  • Shipping new features to the dashboard that customers use to manage their MagicBell experience.

  • Shipping new API endpoints and improving existing ones.

  • Working on our documentation.

  • Maintaining our Ruby Gem (and other SDKs if you are a polyglot).

  • Optimizing database performance as we scale up to billions of notifications a month.

• Hire, attract, and onboard other intelligent engineers. You can help by referring candidates, writing blog posts about the technical challenges, and delivering tech talks at meetups and conferences. We are happy to cover any costs incurred.

• Shape the culture of our company to create the next Stripe, Twilio, or your favorite company.

• Be our developer evangelist:

  • Our go-to-market strategy involves bottom-up developer adoption. Therefore our entire team is an evangelist for our product - all of us write blog posts sharing what we have learned, and we talk to our users directly. (We have some of our biggest customers on a shared Slack workspace)
  • We love building with our own API. In the past, we have built some fun little hacks to get developer attention, like our Hacker News Chrome extension and Firefox add-on. We plan to build more of these as we grow, so hit us up if you have any ideas!

Requirements

These requirements have been selected to make sure you'd be successful at the job. Please read them carefully:

• 8-10 years of programming experience, of which 6+ years of experience with Ruby on Rails (the more, the better).

• Experience writing test-driven code with Rspec and an understanding of integration testing. We require a minimum of two years of test-driven development experience.

• Willingness to go above and beyond. For example, keeping track of new security vulnerabilities that might impact us or fixing customer issues proactively and notifying them.

• Enjoy taking on challenging responsibilities. (We are a startup, after all!) This includes maintaining our uptime and finding creative ways to help customers achieve their goals.

• Good writing ability as demonstrated by documentation, README, or blog posts you have written.

• Excellent communication skills in English. This helps immensely as a remote team.

• Respect for other people's time - For example, showing up for meetings on time and well prepared.

If you have less than 6 years of Ruby on Rails, please still apply since we ask you to break this down in detail during the application process.

Nice-to-Have

• Extensive experience with SQL (specifically Postgresql).

• A good understanding of software architecture & object-oriented design patterns (like SOLID).

• A desire to start your own startup either now or in the future. Startups are hard, and this aspiration will help you appreciate the challenges in the job. You'll get hands-on learning of what building an early-stage startup is like. As a bonus, the founders are prolific angel investors and eager to invest in the startups of our alumni.

Interesting Challenges

We know you want to tackle interesting challenges, and we have quite a few for you:

• Implementing efficient data structures to store and to compute user settings, notification preferences, and delivery configurations.

• Optimizing SQL database performance as we scale to billions of notifications per day.

• Designing elegant REST and GraphQL APIs that stay backward compatible. Stripe does this exceptionally well with its versioning scheme.

• Performant state management across multiple devices with real-time synchronization.

• Concurrency

• Building robust logging and analytics to help our customers understand the flow of their notifications.

• Engineering reliability and performance so we can scale up with our customers.

• Improving the UX/DX as you build new features or improve existing ones. Keeping new releases backward compatible for as long as we can.

A big reason why we love working on MagicBell is that we get to build for other developers. You'll get to work with some of the brightest engineers (our customers) to help them build notifications faster than they ever imagined. We routinely chat with them on our Slack Community (join us there!).

The Offer

We pay well and offer meaningful equity (every full-time employee has equity). We can't match Google/Facebook in their perks, but we make sure you have everything you need to do the best work you have done in your career.

Location: Fully remote

Salary: $120k - $170k (or more if you have a lot more experience than our requirements)

Equity: 0.75% - 1.25% with standard 4-year vesting and an extended 10-year exercise window after 2 years in service. Read why this matters.

Hours: Up to 40 hrs/week. While we don't overwork routinely, as a startup, there are times when you need to work beyond your regular work hours or fix something on the weekend. If that is a strict no for you, we suggest not applying.

Flexible work: We require the EST 10 am to 1 pm overlap, and the rest of the time is up to you to manage. Few meetings, mostly asynchronous communication, and other day-to-day details on our blog.

Time off: 30 working days a year (20 PTO and 10 public holidays. You are welcome to take sick days as you need them).

Benefits: Healthcare (with Dental & Vision in the US), paid time off, and an annual all-expense-paid retreat somewhere beautiful. $1k/yr to attend any conferences/events that you find useful.

WFH Support: $5k for computer, standing desk, mic, or anything else you need. Up to $300/mo for a co-working desk. If you need anything else, please ask.

If you read the entire job description, please list out which of the nice-to-haves you possess in the last question of the application.