Platform engineering is a core group at OpenUnit focused on maintaining and improving our core components, and we are looking for a Senior level engineer to help us do it. This team is focused on our core model architecture, which is critical for the future shaping of OpenUnit and our feature development. As an early employee, you will help shape the decisions around how the engineering organization evolves over the next 2 or 3 years.

In this role, you’ll be working with a team of engineers committed to building OpenUnit's product suite, which enables self-storage operators to better integrate their online store with their physical presence. You can expect to own the implementation of our technical roadmap, empower other engineers, and design best practices. You will collaborate with teams throughout the company and represent our group in cross-departmental projects.

Bonus Points: You’ve mentored teammates on new ways to deepen their technical craft.

About the job

The engineering team consists of two full-time people, and two part-time people, whose work has given rise to the core platform that multiple operators use to handle their day-to-day operations — these operators have acted as test group, and we will soon be letting operators from the waitlist on as we approach a public release. You’ll join the team and work with them closely.

You’ll pitch in on securing our Rails apps, scaling it to match our growth (we always are building towards the next order of magnitude), and keeping it fast, end to end. You’ll develop internal tooling and systems that help our Marketplace, Ops, and Support teams run the business day-to-day. You'll be exposed to a number of different area sets, including revenue management, payment processing, taxation, and all of the "fun" stuff that comes alongside handling connected domain names. You’ll enter a productive development experience that puts a premium on designer and programmer happiness. In the future you will grow a team, both through internal development and external hiring -- you will manage teams and help them prioritize, build and ship the most impactful products & features. You will bring context and learnings into our team from other projects and mentor junior developers through technically challenging decisions.

Here are some real examples of the work we’ve done lately that might help you to get a better idea of what this job entails:

1. Designing, implementing, documenting, and maintaining front-end systems for multiple high-traffic websites
2. Addressing appliction-level encryption to handle personally identifiable information (PII) before it’s sent to the database
3. Building a state machine to allow for different types of payment authorization
4. Routing incoming emails to controller-like mailboxes to allow reply by email

This is a snapshot of our experience running production-grade apps and a capable, supportive team for the long haul. Your experience and background will join ours! We have worlds to learn and we’re eager to do it together. You can expect to teach us, coach us, and expect the same in return.

Backend development

Our team deploys new code many times a day, and we try to maintain a high uptime for the production application. As a team, we’re firmly focused on the web: the core technology that powers our applications on all platforms. It’s hard to pin down a name for this stack, but it’s a majestic monolith, built using Ruby on Rails. We embrace a “HTML over the wire” architecture, of server-rendered HTML, and “sprinkle” bits of interactive JavaScript. Season with Redis and ElasticSearch, we should have all we’ll ever need. For the foreseeable future anyways. We’re taking a privacy-first approach to customer data and use ActiveRecord Encryption, which aims to make encryption as friendly and intuitive as possible for Rails.

Frontend development

Our team approaches front-end work from an unorthodox perspective: our architecture is best described as “HTML over the wire.” In contrast to most of the current industry, we are embracing server-side rendered HTML augmented with minimal JavaScript behavior -- Stimulus is our framework of choice when we need to add interactivity. You’ll use the latest web standards in HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, and modern technologies and frameworks like Ruby on Rails, Stimulus, Hotwire, Elasticsearch and Redis, to develop our web applications, both customer-facing and internal, and customer websites that scale and perform well on all devices.

About you

We’re looking for someone with strong front-end JavaScript experience. You should be well-versed in modern browser APIs, HTML, and CSS. Back-end programming experience, especially with Ruby, is a plus but not a requirement. You won’t know how all the systems work on day one, and we don’t expect you to. Nobody hits the ground running.

A proven track record of success in leading software development teams — strong technical mentorship is a must. Your management skills and technical depth allows you to develop and mentor others as well as build credibility with your team while executing broader engineering strategies. You are comfortable working with senior stakeholders (Director level and up), both technical and non technical. Subsequently, You have successfully built and grown teams of engineers during your career and are comfortable working with your team. As a company, we're not interested in growing multiple, large divisions. We are more excited about the types of products and speed that a small company (50 people or so) can build. As an early employee, you will help shape the decisions around how the enginerring organiziation evolves over the next 2 or 3 years.

We care about what you can do and how you do it, not about how you got here. A strong track record of conscientious, thoughtful work speaks volumes.

This is a remote job. You’re free to work where you work best, anywhere in the world: home office, coworking space, coffeeshops. We currently do not have an office, and look to be a digital by default company.

How to apply

We know that looking for a new role can be both exciting and time-consuming, and we truly appreciate your effort.

Please send an application that speaks directly to this position. Show us your role in OpenUnit's future and OpenUnit's role in yours. Address some of the work we do. Tell us about a newer (less than five years old) web technology you like and why.

If your experience is this close to what we’re looking for, please consider applying. Experience comes in many forms – skills are transferable, and passion goes a long way. We know that diversity makes for the best problem-solving and creative thinking, which is why we’re dedicated to adding new perspectives to the team and encourage everyone to apply.

And remember, we want to know what you're really interested in building and why you want to build it at OpenUnit, so please give us as much detail on this as you'd like.