Sr. Fullstack / Backend Engineer

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Last updated 16JULY.2021

Why Searchlight?

• Searchlight is creating a new category of “data-driven hiring”, focused on data infrastructure that closes the loop between recruiting and post-hire outcomes.

• Fresh funding from top-tier investors like YC, Accel, and Founders Fund

• Fast-growing team tackling an initial $140B market opportunity with a category-defining product

• 77 NPS with customers like Zapier, Udemy, and Coda

• Women-led and mission-driven company, founders are Forbes 30U30 with backgrounds from Stanford, Uber, Google, and McKinsey

• Opportunity for meaningful ownership, leadership, and autonomy

Recommended Reading: Using Data for Hiring at Zapier

We are looking for a teammate we can count on to:

• Given an initial design, consistently deliver an end-to-end new product feature autonomously

• Scope product requirements, write technical specifications, and ship code

• Be shockingly efficient and results-driven to deliver software improvements to our users

• Produce high-quality, production-ready, readable, maintainable code

• Identify high-impact opportunities for engineering investment to improve app performance and developer productivity

• Lend your technical expertise to unblock and invest in other engineers on your team

Relevant Experience:

• 4-7 years of experience software engineering, preferably at least 2 years at a seed, Series A, or Series B company

• Expert in at least one modern engineering framework, and has showed aptitude to pick up new frameworks quickly

  • Our stack is React, Apollo GraphQL, Postgres, Node, JavaScript / TypeScript

Success Profile:

• Self-starter and fast learner

• Sharp at problem solving, critical thinking, and systems thinking

• Proactive communicator, both verbal and written, around technical decisions and project deadlines

• Primarily motivated to deliver high impact solutions to users rather than by using the latest coolest technologies

• Biased towards action and speed of delivery rather than quality

Hiring Process:

• Initial Screen (30 min)

• First Round Interview (1 hour)

• Final Technical Interview (3 hrs)

• Searchlight References

• Final Team Interviews (3 hrs)

Key Teammates:

Anna Wang - CTO/Cofounder

Within 1 week you’ll...

• Onboard with our team

• Ship your first commit on day one

• Take on 1-2 small tickets to address bugs or make minor improvements. These will have both front-end and back-end components to help you gain familiarity with our codebase

• Have 1:1s with everyone on the team

• Go through a product orientation to get familiar with the different pieces of our platform

Within 1 month you'll...

• Ship your first major project, which will involve scoping, writing the technical plan (ERD) with your onboarding buddy, submitting your ERD for team review, creating Jira tickets + estimates, writing unit tests, creating incremental pull requests, requesting code review, and finally - deploy!

• Participate in code reviews for other members of the team

• Shadow a few customer and partner meetings every week

Within 6 months you'll...

• Work with the engineering team to scope and ship products

• Help us grow our team by mentoring new engineers, writing internal tooling and documentation, and interviewing new hires

More about Searchlight

Companies with the best talent win. But the way that companies hire hasn’t changed in decades, and recruiting as a core business function has been largely left behind by technology innovations in other functions like sales, customer success, marketing, etc. Job descriptions are still written in silo-ed documents, recruiting metrics end at time-to-fill instead of quality-of-hire, and we have a devastating diversity problem. While these are big challenges, we see a huge opportunity for Searchlight to own a ton of whitespace in the recruiting tech landscape.

Searchlight's full-cycle talent platform gives companies the right data and infrastructure to assess candidates and scale winning cultures. 

Logistics:

• Remote through Sep 2021 

• Located out of the San Francisco, CA office beyond Sep 2021 with hybrid in-person and remote work

• Weekly team dinners (remote) sponsored by the company

• Salary range $140-180k 

• Significant Equity

• 401(k), Unlimited PTO, Health Insurance (100% paid premiums)

What Hybrid Work Means to Us

We are a fast-paced, tight-knit team that enjoys quality time working synchronously during core business hours. We have a PDX office and will have a SF office by EOY2021. We encourage team members to come into the office 2-3 times a week. 

Diverse and Inclusive Employer

We’re committed to providing equal treatment and opportunity to all applicants at every stage of the hiring cycle and throughout their life at the company. We don’t discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, sex (including pregnancy, gender identity, and sexual orientation), national origin, age, disability, veteran or military status, or any other legally protected status.

Note: Research says men tend to apply even if they only meet ~60% of the job qualifications, whereas women and other marginalized groups are hesitant to do so. If you don’t match 100% of the job qualifications but think you’d be a great fit, we encourage you to apply!