Staff Engineer

Overview

We're looking for a Staff Engineer. Headquartered in Los Angeles, California, Right Balance provides top-tier technology talent for innovative companies in the US. We’re in the top 50 companies to watch in LA.

Engagement Details

What We Do

Our client is the first and largest peer-to-peer marketplace for laundry. Their customers tap the app and outsource their laundry. For them, it’s life without laundry, because they hacked it out of existence. But they solve a second problem too, which is that more and more people of varying backgrounds want to work from home. Luckily, most people have an underutilized washer/dryer, which when combined with our Laundry Pro app, provides the first-ever manual labor work-from-home gig in the world.

For all their users, they're a marketplace for a better life.

Our Progress

Perfect product market fit drove a 100x surge in users & revenue and double-digit MoM growth over the past few years. In 2021 they scaled to 500+ markets throughout the United States. In March 2022 they closed a $10m seed round which included VC investments from Headline, Origin Ventures, Starting Line VC, Ludlow Ventures, and Clean Ventures, as well as notable angel investments from Max Mullen, co-founder of Instacart, Steven Galanis, Co-founder and CEO of Cameo, Joanna Riley, CEO and co-founder of Censia, and Rob Chesnut, Chief Ethics Officer for airbnb. Significant growth continued in 2022 and 2023.

The Role

You won’t just write code—you’ll shape the architectural vision that powers the entire client ecosystem. As our Staff Engineer, you’ll partner with our Head of Engineering to orchestrate large-scale, highly available systems, set new standards for code quality, and push the envelope of technical innovation. You’ll be the guiding force that ensures our platform remains lightning-fast, secure, and endlessly scalable.

What You’ll Do

• Architect the Future: Design and implement distributed systems, microservices, and advanced database strategies (think sharding, partitioning, replication) that form the backbone of our web and mobile products.
• Build at Scale: Develop both front-end and back-end solutions in TypeScript. Your code will power seamless experiences for customers and Laundry Pros across iOS, Android, and the web.
• Champion Excellence: Establish best practices for security, performance optimization, and monitoring. You’ll make sure our product isn’t just good—it’s world-class.
• Lead & Mentor: Guide cross-functional teams, mentor engineers, and provide strategic technical direction. You’ll influence major decisions and shape our client’s engineering roadmap.
• Push Product Velocity: Execute ambitious product goals—like dynamic geo-pricing or international expansion—while keeping the codebase clean, stable, and blazing fast.
• Stay Hands-On: You love coding. You’ll spend most of your time in the trenches, building new features and ensuring our platform evolves at lightspeed.

Here’s How You’ll Leave Your Mark

• Architectural Wizardry: You’ll spearhead system designs that handle high traffic, maintain uptime, and support fast-growing user demands.
• Quality Evangelist: Through code reviews and pair programming, you’ll level up the entire team’s technical bar—no spaghetti code on your watch!
• Technical Visionary: Collaborate with product and design to translate big ideas into robust, scalable solutions that keep us on the cutting edge.
• Operational Maestro: Implement monitoring, alerting, and incident response strategies so they can squash bugs and anomalies before users even notice.
• Innovation Engine: Spot opportunities to adopt new tools or refine existing processes, fueling our culture of continuous improvement.

Tech Stack

Our client tech stack is mostly TypeScript, allowing engineers to implement end-to-end functionality. On the frontend they use Angular/Ionic and on the backend Firebase.

Why You’ll Love Working with Us

• Early Impact: You’ll be one of the first employees at a fast-growing startup. Your fingerprints will be all over our client’s data universe.
• Rocket Growth: They’re experiencing explosive expansion—be part of the journey and watch your own career soar.
• Shape their Culture: Help define their values, collaborate on world-class practices, and influence who they hire next.
• Endless Opportunities: As they grow, you grow. The sky’s the limit for your career trajectory.
• Mission-Driven Team: They work hard, innovate nonstop, and serve our community of users with passion.
• Compensation & Perks: Competitive base salary, equity package, benefits—and the freedom to work where and when you do your best work.

Location

Remote from anywhere in the World (with a 9am Central Time daily standup, and at least 5 hours overlapping CST).

What’s in it for you?

1. Learn and evolve your skills using the latest and greatest technology tools in a rapidly growing company.
2. Learn from the best people around you. We constantly challenge the status quo and invent new ways of building a great product.
3. Flexible hours. Join daily standups, sprint planning, and retrospective meetings. Other than that you’re in control of your own schedule.
4. 100% remote. Work anywhere, whether it is remotely in the comfort of your home, in a shared co-working space, in an RV on the beach, or while being a nomad in another country.
5. Work on challenging problems, innovate, and positively impact many people's lives while having fun doing it.

Required Qualifications

• Upper-intermediate to fluent speaking and writing English. Able to have a real-time conversation.
• 10+ years of full-time hands-on Software Engineering experience.
• 3+ years of full-time hands-on Node.js backend experience.
• 3+ years of full-time hands-on GCP/AWS experience.
• 3+ years of full-time hands-on Tech Lead experience.
• 2+ years of full-time hands-on Typescript experience.
• High-Velocity Mindset: You thrive in a fast-paced, async environment and see obstacles as fuel for creative solutions.
• Startup Spirit: You’re self-directed, love taking ownership, and believe that “no” is just the starting point for “how”.
• Performance Tuner: You’ve built large-scale, low-latency systems and have the battle scars to prove it.
• Global Expansion Experience: If you’ve scaled products across borders—like rolling out dynamic, geo-based features—you’ll fit right in.

Nice to Haves

1. Frontend (Angular/React.js/Vue.js/React Native) experience.
2. DevOps Wizardry: Containerization, orchestration, CI/CD, Infrastructure as Code—if you know it, we want it.
3. Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or equivalent demonstrated ability.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are your typical clients?

The majority of our clients are venture-backed startups at the growth stage. Usually, at this stage, the company already achieved a product-market fit and is looking to expand rapidly. That’s where we bring the best engineering practices, strong architecture, the latest technologies, and consistent processes to help companies scale.

What is the length of your engagements?

Most of our long-term full-time engagements last multiple years. It allows you to evolve your career with the client company taking on more responsibilities.

What’s your company size?

The Right Balance team is 60+ engineers going to 100+ by the end of the year. The current client size team is 141+ people. The timing is great to be a part of a rapidly growing team making meaningful contributions.

What happens if the engagement is completed?

Most of our engagements are long-term in nature. That said, if the current engagement is ramping down, we’ll present you with more long-term opportunities to transition into.

What are your core values?

• Client First: we only win when our clients win. We treat client challenges as our own.
• Ownership: we embrace responsibility, taking on challenges, getting them to completion, and enjoying getting things done.
• Quality: we’re passionate about achieving quality outcomes by applying meticulous attention to detail.