My team at Upright is hiring for a software engineering position. I’m writing this to give a more personal impression of what the job and team looks like. Thanks for reading, and I hope you’ll consider applying!

Logistical details

The exact title isn’t set in stone, but we’re looking for someone with a few years of experience. Here’s the job listing: https://weworkremotely.com/remote-jobs/upright-labs-fullstack-engineer. We have a mix of Software Engineers and Senior Software Engineers, so expect a title like that.

We’re looking for either a fullstack engineer or fullstack with a frontend focus. See the job listing for the tech stack (basically Rails backend + React frontend).

Salaries aren’t adjusted to where you live, which is great if you’re anywhere outside of Silicon Valley or New York IMO, plus we have the flexibility to move anywhere in North American timezones. My salary is very similar to the other software engineers I’ve kept in close touch with over the years. Glad to share more info about compensation over private chat.

It’s fully remote long-term, not just due to COVID.

The interview process is 1 phone screening + 3 technical interviews (an hour each) over Zoom. We do include some live-coding problems. We try to stay away from leetcode problems, in favor of real-world coding and design problems. We’re not trying to drill you on the specific nuances of some framework, but you should be proficient in Ruby and/or Javascript.

We’re not able to sponsor H-1B work visas, unfortunately.

Culture

I think everyone really enjoys themselves here, and we have good relationships. I smile a lot throughout the day. We have a great set of custom emojis in slack, and we use them liberally :happy-gandalf-nodding:.

Management cares about employees and their work life balance. I took 2 months off when my son was recently born, and never once had to hop on for work. We do have an unlimited PTO policy, which some people are cautious about, but our management actually makes sure that we take a good chunk of time off every year.

I don’t have to pretend to care about the mission; it’s really a good mission. We build software that helps a lot of Goodwills across the country sell their secondhand goods online. Goodwill has a good mission, and I like having that behind our work! But even if you took that away, I find it personally satisfying and fulfilling building workflows to helping their warehouses run smoothly.

Engineering work

From a software engineering perspective, we have a great tech stack and a pragmatic approach to our decision making. We care about quality and the customer impact especially, but we’re careful to keep a minimal / low-friction process. We have a good CI pipeline and test suite (although it’s backend-heavy), with 1-click deploys to prod. Our architecture isn’t overly complex (Rails backend + React front-end with sidekiq background jobs), but still has enough facets to keep a variety of interesting problems coming my way. I really enjoy developing software with my teammates. They know a lot in different areas, and they give great feedback during code/design discussions, but nobody comes to the table with boxing gloves. People are enthusiastic about solving problems, but nobody is overly passionate/stubborn (a great balance).

We try to stay productive as a team, but there’s not a huge pressure to get everything done we put in the sprint. We’re not grinding to meet quarterly commits to appease the stockmarket- we’re focusing on building what our customers need and keeping them happy. And our customers are really pleasant to work with as well! (Although the dev team doesn’t work closely with customers any more.)

We spend most of our time doing feature development and bugfixes, but there’s support work that comes up. The support work involves the same product we work on day-to-day (there’s no legacy solution to support).

I have 1 on 1s with my manager (the CTO) and they’re good. He still spends a decent chunk of time doing development work too, so he’s involved and close with us to give great feedback.

Growth opportunities

On a down-to-earth perspective, I work with some very smart engineers, and I continue to learn and grow from them.

For those who want a tall career ladder to climb, with prestigious corporate titles, Upright isn’t big enough for those (we have about 20 employees and 5 devs including the CTO). We don’t have any Associate Principal Staff (whatever) Software Engineers.

But, we do have a distinction between Software Engineers and Senior Software Engineers, and there have been engineers promoted while working here. I can say that they’ve earned it too, by doing great work and being a solid engineer. So I think there’s reasonable opportunity for engineers to grow even with our current team structure.

Over the next few years, there would likely be room for people to move into a team lead / engineering manager position if they wanted to go down a management track and become less of an individual contributor.