Senior Engineer

The short version

Early-stage venture-backed startup looking for a software engineer to use Python, Javascript, and HTML/CSS to help build out our web platform. Good fit if you like moving fast, having impact, and working on a variety of different things.

Who we are

We’re a fast-moving startup with a vision to empower all professionals by helping them build better relationships. Our vision is to fix the network gap: the inequality of opportunity driven by not having the right connections. To solve this problem, we’re combining the best practices of the world’s top relationship builders with artificial intelligence.

We’re building a mission-driven team that strives to live out our values every day:

- Customer-centricity- Diversity of perspective- Authenticity- Growth (individual and collective)- Impact

We’re an ambitious, driven team and we push ourselves to accomplish a lot quickly. In the past couple of years we've gone through one of the world's top accelerators, raised two rounds of venture financing, launched our product, rapidly grown our customer base, and architected a robust set of machine learning models as a core source of competitive advantage. In the process, we’ve been named one of Chicago’s top 50 startups to watch, one of Chicago Inno’s 50 on Fire, a part of the highly selective Google for Startups Black Founders Accelerator and Black Founders Fund. And we’re just getting started!

The opportunity

4Degrees is at an inflection point - we’ve built a product that’s pioneering a new category of software (relationship intelligence), and are rapidly growing. We're well funded, have hundreds of highly engaged customers, who consistently increase their contract size with us, and are planning with us on how we can take this company into the future. We’ve done this with a scrappy, early-stage team.

The opportunity ahead of us is vast - every business that relies on their relationship network to drive their business has a use case for 4Degrees. To seize that opportunity, we're looking for great engineers to help us build on top of the foundation we've created, while also pioneering new ways to help our customers unlock the value their relationships can bring to their business. You’ll build and use a versatile set of skills: switching between tasks like rolling out major new functionality, diagnosing and fixing bugs, and playing support for other front-end or back-end engineers.

By joining us, you will play a highly impactful role in re-inventing the way professional relationships are managed and building a rapidly growing category. Along the way, you’ll have an opportunity to get unrivaled exposure to all facets of building a startup, and directly shape the outcomes of 4Degrees and its customers. And if you want to build a company of your own after joining us, you'll get direct mentorship from the founding team and support in doing so!

The impact you’ll make by joining us

Within 1 month you’ll:

- Complete our onboarding process - which will help you ramp up on our company, vision, product, key objectives, and how your role will contribute to all of those!

- Dive deep into our product development process and understand how we go from concept to design to implementation

- Learn our technical stack and apply development patterns throughout your work

- Ship your first few features to our customers

Within 3 months you’ll:

- Assume ownership of a quarterly roadmap project, which will enable you to drive the development of a key piece of functionality for our customers

- Drive timely resolution of customer issues, in coordination with the customer success and implementation teams.

- Have made a visible impact on the product for all 4Degrees users

Within 6 months you’ll:

- Reliably ship full features to our customers and for internal team use

- Understand the product at scale and be able to provide input to improve our technical systems and tools

- Be comfortable navigating most of our stack and infrastructure

Within 1-2 years, you’ll:

- Be responsible for the planning, scoping, design, and implementation of new features

- Champion future engineering initiatives

- Help build and shape the future of engineering at 4Degrees

About you

- Excited about the 4Degrees mission and believes in our core values

- Thrives in a fast-paced environment, and is comfortable with experimentation and risk-taking

- Driven by the opportunity to create impact, and takes full ownership of achieving personal and team objectives

- Motivated to explore the potential for technology to augment people’s ability to form and strengthen professional relationships

- Challenges existing industry best practices and takes inspiration from disparate sources to build a groundbreaking product

- Collaborative mindset - recognizing that most great outcomes are accomplished by teams, not individuals

Skills you’ll need

- Proficiency with back-end programming (Python preferred, but we can train you if you're good with Ruby, Node, PHP, etc.)

- Proficiency with front-end programming in vanilla languages (Javascript, HTML, CSS)

- Comfort with plain SQL and an ORM

Why this role might not be a fit

- You aren't interested in an early-stage environment.  We care a lot about our team members and avoid the chaos of the popular caricatures of startups. That said, we seek to move quickly, you'll have a large amount of latitude to do what's best for our customers (sometimes without a lot of guidance), and you'll be more resource-constrained than working at a larger company (e.g., Facebook, Google).  It's also unlikely that your base compensation will be equal to what you'd receive from working at Apple or Google (though your efforts can much more directly impact how valuable the equity upside is here).  That environment might be exciting - or it might not align with what you're looking for.

- You’re uncomfortable with change and ambiguity.  If we all do our jobs well, the company will continue to grow rapidly.  This means your role will likely shift in scope to accommodate that growth and that new challenges will emerge that we don’t yet have the answers to.  Depending on what you’re looking for, that dynamism may not be a fit (which is OK)!

- You're not interested in interfacing with customers.  While your role will be heavily focused on developing new features and improving existing ones, our product development process is heavily customer-oriented (customer-centricity is one of our values!).  As a result, everyone on the team gets the opportunity to connect with our customers to help identify problems, validate potential new product initiatives, and troubleshoot issues.  You won't be expected to lead these efforts - but you may find this role difficult if you have no interest in those conversations.

- You don't have strong communication skills.  Given the size of our team and how closely we work together, we really care about having everyone on the team be both willing and active communicators internally (in written and verbal forms).  If you're looking for a role where you have limited interaction with your teammates and aren't expected to help keep other stakeholders informed or weigh in on decisions, then we might not be a good match.