Staff Software Engineer

Who we are

We are a small team of motivated engineers trying to solve real-world problems. Watch Duty has a significant impact on safety and improves the quality of life for millions of people. We are passionate about solving these problems, and about building a world-class product backed and enabled by great tech.  We are a small team with a flat structure, we value open and direct communication, and having a good time while doing so. We try not to take ourselves too seriously, but we take our work very seriously.

We communicate on Slack and use Trello, Figma, Github and CI/CD for development workflows. All feature development will be peer-reviewed and product tested before release.

Who you are

You are a motivated, pragmatic engineer with a proven track record of finding solutions and getting things done.

You like owning a full problem space and working with stakeholders to develop simple solutions. From requirement gathering to technical design, to project planning and delegation, through final testing and release monitoring, you are involved from start to finish. An eye for "boring tech" and the trade-offs that complex solutions cost is an instinct you've honed in the past. 

You are able to work independently and manage your own time, but also value teaching and learning from your colleagues and are open to feedback and multiple points of views on the best way to get things done. 

Requirements

8+ years of software engineering experience and a proven track record of impact.

Our current tech stack

We believe in picking the simplest and lowest maintenance solution until a complex problem dictates a more complex solution:

Our tech stack and areas of work include:

- Django monolith

- RDS MySQL/Postgres + Postgis

- Cloudfront caching for asset and API caching

- Redis for application level caching

- Dagster data orchestration pipeline for geospatial processing

- Single Typescript codebase with CapacitorJS bridge to native apps

- Extensive automation integrations with Slack to accelerate our reporters

- New Relic, Sentry, Sendgrid, Anthropic, Mapbox, and Firebase Cloud Messaging

Compensation & Benefits

We will offer you a competitive salary. We believe that non-profit employees should be compensated as they would be in the private sector.

We believe in a strong work-life balance that leaves you motivated, enthusiastic, and productive. We believe in results over hours worked and will trust you to find a flexible schedule that works for yourself and the team. We back each other up for on-call duties and ensure that there is a balance between the critical nature of our work and a life outside of work.

This position is open to remote work. We have a few employees in San Francisco but are otherwise a distributed organization.

As a small team, we offer medical, dental & vision, and can work with you via compensation to make up any gaps relative to prior organizations. 

What we’ll create

We are expanding our technology platform to better serve the public. We build whatever it takes to help citizens be safe in the face of natural disasters. This has meant building apps and a website to provide a simple and accurate way to receive relevant and timely information on wildfires near you, as well as extensive automation for our reporters to empower their work.

Impact by the numbers:

- 3M MAU+

- 500M+ push notifications sent in the past year

- 800M API requests in the past 30 days

- 86 NPS (Net Promoter Score)

- Our app has a rating of 4.9 stars on 13k reviews in the app store

- Countless lives affected and improved

Your work at Watch Duty will have a huge impact for people in the path of natural disasters. We look forward to hearing from you.