Remind | Senior Engineers and Engineering Leaders | San Francisco | REMOTE
2020 was a memorable year for Remind. With Zoom and Google we served as the backbone of the US education system as schools pivoted quickly to online learning. I'll never forget the early morning of Friday 13 Mar 2020 when our scale went through the roof and the team worked over the next 2 months to harden and improve our systems during this real-time load test. And we did all this while transitioning to fully remote.
Our sales have also been strong (which created even more load fun!), and we are investing in both continuing to harden our systems and also launch a new coaching business.
We are looking for senior folks who want to serve students, their families, and teachers as we build a successful business on a solid tech stack.
While many startups are struggling, Remind (https://www.remind.com) is maturely and responsibly growing as our influence and impact on the US education market only increases during this pandemic. We'd love to have you on our team of engineers who value listening, learning, great tech, and joyful, trusting collaboration. We have roles for
* Android engineer (primarily kotlin)
* Fullstack engineer (react/TypeScript, GraphQL)
* Site Reliability engineer (SRE) (SLAs, SLOs, error budgets, embedded in product teams)
Remind | Software Engineer | San Francisco or Remote | Full Time
At Remind (https://remind.com/) we are building an ed-tech business on top of our 27 million monthly active teachers, students, parents, and guardians as we strive to get every kid a chance to succeed.
We are looking for senior engineers to help us scale our services as well as take our reliability to the next level. We've got systems in go, node, ruby, and python backed by AWS Aurora, Dynamo, SQS, and lots of other fun tech. See https://boards.greenhouse.io/remind/jobs/496462?gh_jid=49646... for more info, or reach out directly to me.
We are a small but mighty team looking for engineers who want to have deep impact on both education and our business.
I run engineering and am blessed to be able to not only serve teachers with a great app, but also to work alongside a great team building a business.
Email me kevin at remindhq dot com if interested. Thanks!
With 27 million monthly active teachers, students, and parents/guardians, join us as we build a business to give every student the opportunity to succeed! We hack on Swift/Realm on iOS, Kotlin/Java on Android, React in our web client, and Go/Ruby/Python/Node + Amazon RDS/Aurora/Dynamo. We are a small team working on BIG problems.
We're hiring for all roles! Apply at https://www.remind.com/careers; or, if you don't see something you like, hit me up at kevin at remindhq dot com (I run engineering) and let's talk!
I've definitely felt the challenge of hiring in a startup as a result of these kinds of numbers. I'm curious what others think will come of this seeming bubble in compensation.
Its not a bubble. $240k is a reasonable salary for a professional with good grades from a good university working for a highly profitable private company. In fact as long as there is such a gap between revenue per employee, and compensation per employee, there will only be upward pressure on pay and conditions.
In reality, software engineering salaries outside of established tech environments are kept artificially low because there is no "guild of software engineers", and therefore anybody can get hired no matter what level of skill they have.
I too run a software startup. The most common and serious error I see in my fellow startup founders is expecting to build better technology with worse pay and conditions. You might be able to wrangle something decent out of some poorly qualified yet smart people, but its a bit of a long shot.
I was more looking at the differential between FB -> Alphabet -> Rest. As a member of the Rest in the Bay Area, hiring has become quantitatively more challenging in the last 12 months as FB continues to gobble up talent. Perhaps it's not so much a bubble as it is a deep, likely irreversible change to SV.
When I attended Facebook university day, 100% of the students I spoke with were from top schools. The majority I spoke with were from Ivy League Universities, of the non Ivy League students, one was from MIT, two from UMD, one from UCLA, and one from UT Austin. This is not a bubble, this is them hiring the best. I have been in class with students who chose to enter software engineering at major companies rather than investment banking.
Why is it a bubble when they have an incredibly successful business that prints money where the people building the service are being rewarded for helping build such a successful outcome?
That's sloppy thinking. Here's and example why: what if a new regulation new banned targeted advertising? That would kneecap FB's business model and unique value proposition while making it easier for new entrants, since they won't have to compete with FB's now-legally-useless data trove.
Because that was exactly the argument banks used before 2008. Not that salaries in Finance are low now but a lot of the excesses have been cut back following the crisis. Banks also made a ton of money pre-2008 but that didn't come out of nowhere.
So far, there has been no industry that just continued making high margins over decades without any cut backs. I doubt tech will be the first one.
If you live in a first world country, try to find out what your mid-tier technology consultancies (Accenture, Deloitte, CGI, etc) are charging customers. It is almost certainly around 250-350k per year, even if they are working for an unglamorous, boring, traditional customer. The real issue is that outside of leading tech environments, too much rent is being extracted from the wages of software engineers.
Great point, although said rent is being driven largely by FB and GOOG. I remember the first time I was outbid for a flat in 2016 when a small group of googlers paid cash for the entire first year of rent. I should have moved to Seattle that afternoon :)
Pre-2008 not all banks were hugely profitable. Some investment banks were and some smaller companies. The tech sector isn't that dissimilar. Salaries in SV show that not only Google and Facebook are willing to pay $200k+ for engineers, most of the industry will (and usually can).
As tech can't print money, these salaries must come from somewhere. And at some point those sources won't be able or willing to provide it. Maybe that's a soft landing, maybe harder. I don't know but as I said previously, I'd be surprised if tech's the first industry in centuries that channels wealth into the hands of few (including SV landlords) without any consequences.
Salaries in SV show that (...) most of the industry will (and usually can).
Yeah, that's what I doubt. SV is not the tech industry as a whole. The average salary for a software developer in the US is less than half than that, and if we removed those top outliers, it'll be even less. So I'm skeptical that this is out of the ordinary; doesn't seem that different from other well-paid white-collar professions like lawyers.
And, even in SV, most of the industry cannot; certainly the AirBnB/uber/lyft's of the world can, but the smaller companies seem to be falling behind (based on anecdotal conversations at least).
Why “bubble”? Their business is more profitable than crack cocaine, and their profit per employee is over a million dollars. Seems like fair compensation for once.
It's not a bubble by any stretch of the imagination. Facebook pays a lot because they have to pay a lot to get quality people to want to work at Facebook.
Compare this against companies like SpaceX where the median compensation is quite awful for the industry made even worse by the area (compensation is well below $90k in most cases). This poor compensation is made even more peculiar at a glance by the incredibly high standard of employee they have. But they have these incredibly well qualified people lining up outside the door wanting to work for them.
Of course refuting my argument is companies like Netflix. I don't entirely understand why they pay so much. But at least just taking examples like Facebook and SpaceX, compensation is mostly just based on supply and demand - rather than massive ongoing bubble of inflating salaries.
Remind (https://www.remind.com/careers) is looking for several roles as seek to transform the relationship between teachers, families, and schools in our quest to give each student a chance to succeed in school.
We need
* backend engineers to do distributed systems work on our messaging infrastructure (go, ruby, sql, nosql, sync, async) as we support our 23M active users and scale both users and interactions rapidly
Profitable NLP/ML startup with offices in SF and Kyiv. We need a wide range of skills, from NLP hackers proficient in Lisp, to middle tier engineers solid in Erlang, Haskell, Scala, and Java, to front end engineers passionate about amazing user experiences. We are actively working in Deep Learning and ML and need the finest engineers and computer scientists as we pursue our mission.
Feel free to reach out directly to kevin dot mcintire at grammarly dot com for more info.
Location: San Francisco or Palo Alto, INTERN or full time
BrightRoll (http://www.brightroll.com) is looking for all kinds of engineers, especially server side hackers to work on composing internal services into a public, Fielding-friendly API. We value functional programming, distributed systems, fault tolerance and high availability, backed by all kinds of languages and persistence schemes. We are serious about scala, erlang, ruby, node, and store stuff in SQL, nosql, and sometimes in plain old files.
Our culture is one of uncompromising transparency and GSD. We value risk taking, learning from failure, provide superb compensation and benefits, and enjoy brewing beer and cider together in addition to hacking together.
Feel free to apply via the web site, and let us know hacker news sent you, or contact me directly (f00biebletch at gmail dot com). Thanks!
Skype - Palo Alto, CA - Software Engineer
Fulltime, H1B
We are building large-scale elastic services to support the evolution of the Skype network. The important part is that we have a lot of fun building and owning distributed systems and are looking for engineers who can come in and push their first feature to production within a few days of starting and who can also help us get that duration down to hours. The stack is primarily azure/.net/C#, although there is some node.js in the house and when we do UIs we don't use biggish server-side stacks. But when we do server-side systems we run them on 1000s of instances and support 10^5 req/sec all day, every day.
The key is that we own our own systems and hence our destiny. You can't ask for anything more than that.
2020 was a memorable year for Remind. With Zoom and Google we served as the backbone of the US education system as schools pivoted quickly to online learning. I'll never forget the early morning of Friday 13 Mar 2020 when our scale went through the roof and the team worked over the next 2 months to harden and improve our systems during this real-time load test. And we did all this while transitioning to fully remote.
Our sales have also been strong (which created even more load fun!), and we are investing in both continuing to harden our systems and also launch a new coaching business.
We are looking for senior folks who want to serve students, their families, and teachers as we build a successful business on a solid tech stack.
See https://www.remind.com/about/ and https://engineering.remind.com/ for more reading.
Email me (kevin at remindhq dot com) for more info.