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Senior Software Engineer - Back End

Common Room

Common Room

Software Engineering
United States
Posted on Apr 6, 2021

About us

Common Room puts companies in the driver’s seat of the modern customer journey by helping them tap into the product usage trends, social intent, and community conversations that fuel growth.

Today’s fastest-growing companies are user-led, but many organizations struggle to identify meaningful user signals and take action with full context. Common Room brings together all the user activity you care about in one place so you can track the entire customer journey, spot the signal from the noise, and take action and automate.

We’ve raised over $50 million from top-tier investors including Greylock, Index, and Madrona to build the community platform for modern SaaS companies. And we’re backed by 25+ operators from community-first organizations such as Figma, Stripe, Airtable, Slack, Notion, Loom, and more.

You + Common Room? You’d be joining a team that revels in asking hard questions, collaborating gladly, and making decisions quickly—a team that values simplicity, passion, trust, each other, and our customers above all.

So hello! Please, knock on our door. We'd love to meet you.

Why we need you:

Your ability to develop a deep understanding of our infrastructure, data models and overall system are your superpowers. You build APIs that other engineers can use to solve customer problems in our product, and also focus on ensuring that our systems are efficient, scalable and reliable. You use your experience and expertise to ensure that Common Room’s core internal capabilities, infrastructure, and systems continue to serve the needs of our customers and our team, often staying one step ahead of the product.

Outside of this, you also identify and participate in important company-building initiatives that a fast growing startup needs.

You would enjoy being a member of our team if you:

  • Have 5+ years of experience, or consider yourself either a stable anchor or an untapped genius ready to flourish
  • Revel in your craft, are excited by and capable of owning large projects primarily on the backend domain
  • Collaborate effectively with other experienced engineers, including application/front-end engineers
  • Are experienced with building at startup speed, or excited to experience and embrace it
  • You have good judgement on tradeoffs and tools needed to solve the problem, and don’t over index on trendy/fashionable tech. You generally prefer supported, stable technologies
  • Use customer problems as input into designing systems, and find joy in creating simple, elegant solutions
  • Consider observability, SLA and scalability implications, but are able to avoid premature optimization
  • Feel at home with AWS, Postgres, and Node.js
  • Bring your authentic self to work, and engage in candid + respectful feedback
  • Build sustainably, and are capable of managing your time and priorities as best suits your needs
  • Enjoy the journey as much as the destination, but never lose sight of the destination
  • Demonstrate pride, ownership, and accountability for your work, and expect the same from those you work with

Our current tech stack:

We choose tools that help solve the problem at hand efficiently. For our current set of problems, we prefer to primarily use TypeScript with Node.js. We use TypeGraphQL for our API endpoints, Apollo/Express as our web server, and Postgres (hosted on RDS) as our database. We use React for front-end, and AWS for our infrastructure needs.

Our values:

  • Be Customer-centric - We work backwards from the needs of our customers. The crisp articulation of customer value guides our decisions.
  • Strive for Simplicity - We choose simplicity over complexity whenever possible. We seek to identify and understand the essential quality of what we are building.
  • Make it Happen - We are quick to take the first step, and prioritize decisiveness over fear of making a mistake. We don’t confuse motion for movement and we measure ourselves on impact over actions.
  • We’re In this Together - We measure personal success by the success of our customers and teammates. Relationships matter, and the strongest ones are built on the foundations of trust, enablement, and transparency.

Our benefits:

Our investment in caring for our employees and their families is a key part of our values and culture at Common Room:

  • Competitive base compensation with meaningful equity ownership
  • Health insurance including medical, dental, and vision
  • We pay 100% of your employee premium and 50% of your premium for any dependents
  • Long Term Care insurance
  • Unlimited Paid Time Off
  • Paid Company Holidays
  • Work from home policy including a laptop and support for your home office needs
  • 401(k) self contribution
  • Commuter Benefits
  • Paid Family Leave
  • Opportunity to join a diverse, passionate, and fun team at a pivotal time in the company’s lifecycle

Common Room provides equal employment opportunities to all employees and applicants for employment and prohibits discrimination and harassment of any type without regard to race, color, religion, age, sex, national origin, disability status, genetics, protected veteran status, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, or any other characteristic protected by federal, state or local laws.