Senior Software Engineer

About StartPlaying

StartPlaying.Games is the largest marketplace for finding game masters to host digital tabletop games like D&D. Today, more than 40 million people play D&D around the world and sales have grown by double-digit percentages for the last five consecutive years. But still finding people to host and play these games with is challenging. Most solutions involve digging through discord servers, Reddit, and specialty forums. So we built StartPlaying.Games to solve this problem.

• We are on a mission to create belonging through intimate social gaming communities. We call the hosts of these communities Game Masters AKA: GMs. And we believe being a Game Master is the best gig economy job in the world!
• We’re building what we know and ultimately want to use ourselves. (One of our founders is the OG San Francisco Game Master)
• We’re all passionate gamers (tabletop, video games, whatever!) who want to spread the joy we’ve known for years.

At StartPlaying, we deeply understand...

• how to incorporate fun and play
• diversity and safety in our community are of the utmost importance
• people want a fast and easy way to play awesome games with cool humans 😎
• It all starts with the right team — a team that cares deeply about values, players, Game Masters, and each other.

🙌 DO THE BEST WORK OF YOUR LIFE 🙌

As a team we have an eclectic group, and we love that. We’ve created delight in every aspect of life from conventions to brick and mortar stores. We've made products at some of the top product-led organizations and shipped experiences millions of customers still use every day.

We love passionate people who are obsessive about what they do. We care about quality over quantity and working with people that inspire and excite us. We want to give you the tools, environment, team, and resources you need to do your best work.

💰 Our investors include💰

YCombinator, a16z, Sahil Lavingia, & Rahul Vohra among many others.

StartPlaying does not discriminate on the basis of race, sex, color, religion, age, national origin, marital status, disability, veteran status, genetic information, sexual orientation, gender identity or any other reason prohibited by law in provision of employment opportunities and benefits.

The Position

🤔 Sound like you? 🤔

Writes code gud:

You are a software engineer generalist and you’re good at it. You own technical architecture, enjoy identifying future needs and ideating on solutions to help us scale. You thoroughly research and document implementation options and their trade-offs, and make the best choice. You complete your work with a high degree of quality.

Mentorship:

You enjoy pointing out code that ‘smells’, enforcing best practices/conventions, teaching new concepts, and reviewing code/coaching junior engineers through your reviews.

Technical Direction Setter:

You are a documentation god; laying the groundwork for best practices, contributing to the wiki, owning code conventions guide and linting rules. You vet and re-vet tools and frameworks and you’re not afraid to call out the CTO on his shit!

Glue:

You are a great teammate and usually the glue for your team. Doing the needed, but often invisible, tasks to keep the team moving forward and shipping their best work. Working behind the scenes to expedite the most important projects and ensure that they cross the finish line.

Have taken the Oath of Growth:

You have a growth mindset. You give and receive feedback well without being combative or getting defensive, take accountability for your mistakes and choose to learn from them, and you approach subjects and issues with curiosity.

Problem solver:

You excel at understanding and solving complex problems, identifying tech pain points, and thinking about future implications of a solution/feature. You also have incredible attention to detail.

Communication enthusiast:

You have strong communication (written and verbal) and can use that ability to effectively communicate and collaborate with a diverse range of people and job functions.

Authentic:

You bring your authentic self to work and are able to have fun, not take yourself too seriously, and genuinely love what you do.

💻 Role 💻

• StartPlaying is a web-based product. (just fyi 🙃 )
• Champion the best engineering practices and build excellent engineering culture within the organization.
• Help estimate, plan, and execute projects, features, and integrations.
• Own and deliver technical projects from the planning stage through shipping.
• Work with CTO to define the overall technical architecture for major parts of the product, focusing on the user experience.
• Lay the groundwork for and help maintain engineering guidelines, processes, and coding standards.
• Continually grow your technical skills to solve our hardest technical challenges around quality, performance, robustness, and reliability.
• Laugh at CEO’s poor attempts at humor.
• Use modern tools and frameworks to develop new product functionality.
• Use and develop your skills as a mentor and technical leader to help build up junior engineers.
• Perform design and code reviews and advise/mentor junior engineers.
• Understand how key technical decisions will drive business outcomes.
• Contribute to the product process: thinking through UX, beautiful UI, and connecting with customers to solve their problems.
• Actually writing code!

Requirements

Experience:

• 5+ years of full stack development experience
• Prior mentorship experience
• Languages: TypeScript/JavaScript, PostgreSQL, GraphQL or REST, React

Nice to haves:

• AWS
• Startup Experience

Technologies we use:

• Languages: TypeScript, PostgreSQL, GraphQL, React, Next.js
• Tools: Linear, GitHub, AWS (Lambda, RDS, S3, CloudWatch), Notion, Discord, Zoom

Our Hiring Process

1. A phone screen with Nate (CEO) 30m
2. Culture Add interview with Siyarin (Head of Customer and Operations) 1h
3. Take-home assessment Graded by Jared (CTO) - 2 business days to complete
4. Tech Screen with Jared (CTO) - you'll go over your take home together
5. Reference Checks
6. Offer?!

Benefits

✅ Taking Care of Your Future ✅

• Compensation: $119,000 - $162,000 + 75th percentile Equity
• Medical, dental and vision insurance: 100% coverage for you, 50% coverage for all your dependents.
• Voluntary insurance: short-term disability, long-term disability, and life insurance.
• 401(k) plan through .
• Free access to OneMedical, Health Advocate, and Teladoc

🏝 Generous Time Off 🏝

• Take as much vacation as you like (no less than 2 weeks!)
• All Federal holidays, plus Thanksgiving and Winter Break.
• We’re flexible on individuals moving their time off to align with their celebrated holidays.
• Flexible parental leave
• One free nerd convention (of your choosing) + one company sponsored offsite/trip per year

✍️ Investing in Your Growth ✍️

• We budget for your professional development.
• We do an optional company “book club”. We read books together and discuss if/how to implement some of the ideas into the company.
• We do team building activities and seminars together.

💯 Setting You Up For Success 💯

• Custom MacBook Pro.
• $1000 budget for workstation setup (not including your MacBook)
• Flexible spending accounts for commuter costs, dependent care, and healthcare expenses.