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Senior Product Engineer

BuildBetter is a software product that:

  1. Ingests internal and external unstructured qualitative data for companies, including internal meetings, external customer calls, customer chat logs, twitter reviews, etc.
  2. Structures that qualitative data by generating high-quality extractions with AI.
  3. Executing custom workflows and generating a knowledge repository based on the processed data and extractions.

Our missing is to help every company on earth become product-led which, in our minds, is an inevitability. Product-led, is NOT PLG, product-led just means the product teams will be driving a majority of the revenue driving decisions by influencing retention, engagement, and expansion.

Our core value is to be in service of our customers by building the best product of our lives to help our customers build the best products of their lives.

Role Overview

At BuildBetter, we look for engineers who are deeply invested in both the technical challenges and the user experience, regardless of their specific role:

  • Software engineers are problem solvers who dive deep into complex challenges, balancing the immediate needs of the business with the foresight to build scalable and maintainable solutions.
  • Product engineers are creators who are passionate about crafting seamless and delightful experiences for our users, ensuring that every interaction with our product is impactful and intuitive.

Regardless of whether you are focused on backend, frontend, or full-stack development, every engineer at BuildBetter is expected to care about the user experience and contribute to building products that resonate with our users.

In our first full-time non-founder engineering hire, we’d like to see both with a bias towards software engineering. That means being able to go deep on business logic problems (primarily on the backend) while being able to contribute to customers’ direct experience of the product (primarily through the UI) when there isn’t much deep technical work to do.

You’ll be working with the two founder engineers: Adam is a UX designer and UI engineer and is an archetypal product engineer; Nikhil is has an ML engineering background and is an archetypical software engineer. Adam holds the product prioritization stick, and Nikhil is is responsible for most technical decision making.

Key Responsibilities

Above anything else (and this applies across every single employee at BuildBetter, whether a founder or a hire), your responsibility is to deliver business value to your customers and your teammates, in that order.

The specifics, while merely downstream of the aforementioned, deserve to be named:

Short-term: you’ll be helping to offload work from Nikhil, as he is the current bottleneck and the most stretched thin on the engineering team. This means being able to offload projects from him that are primarily backend-focused, including:

  • Creating integrations into qualitative data platforms and anywhere else that useful data for a product might live (think Intercom, Zoom Cloud Recordings, Kustomer, Twitter, Reddit) to synchronize to a BuildBetter-specific data representation.
  • Extending our AI-driven extractions system, including building reporting tools, ensuring fast response times, and creating customization options for the range of extractions that customers can request.
  • Iterating on an automation platform that enables customers to build customized workflows that are triggered based on various steps of processing their qualitative data.
  • Building out a more mature identity and access management system that help larger customers derive the value from our tool while remaining compliant with their own operational needs.

Long-term: depending on the week, you’ll be bounding between “product engineering land” and “software engineering land.” Going into product engineering land means being able to build out UIs, even if they’re a bit rough, and being able to think less from a technical frame and more from a user experience frame. More than anything, it means being down to do whatever is needed given the circumstances.

Technical Requirements

The greatest technical need is to be able to learn fast, which reduces the need for familiarity with any specific technology. We’re a B2B SaaS app, which means that the technologies that we aim to use are mostly plain and simple.

Other pay-to-play technical needs:

  1. Our backend is in a reflected version of TypeScript, so experience with TS, or ability to rapidly onboard onto TS, is an absolute must.
  2. A functional understanding of how browsers work - as a SaaS app, this is pretty important.
  3. Have worked on systems with reasonably complex B2B schemas before (examples of analogous systems being: Zapier, CRMs, tray.io, and other data and workflow management platforms).
  4. Avoid new abstractions and infrastructure for as long as possible before adopting something new.
  5. Have worked on products where you’ve built integrations using OAuth.
  6. Have worked on products where you’ve had to integrate with enterprises, which means familiarity with all of the ensuing concerns, like permissions, the authz/authn SAML/SSO/ActiveDirectory clusterfuck, and an understanding that enterprises are buying solutions, not products.
  7. Be able to navigate and contribute to a React frontend codebase. We don’t need you to come as a React expert, but we do need you to be able to contribute both in business logic and passably in user interfaces, and be comfortable with regular frontend contributions even if most of your work is business logic related.

Experience with any reflected language, especially Python or Java, will be useful.

Non-technical Requirements

This can be gauche to say in some circles of engineers, but we want you to love and give a shit about what you do. There are two motivations for this:

1. Everyone at BuildBetter gives a lot of shits about and loves what they do, and it’s just going to be lonely for you and awkward for us if it’s ‘just a job.'

2. In the margin, people who do what they love are going to be better at what they do; as people who love what they do and are good at what they do because of it, we want to have more people that are like us working at BB. We also need you to be as hard-working as we are - and if you love what you do, it shouldn't really be a problem.

Qualifications

If you’ve gotten this far, you can probably guess our stance on qualifications:

  1. We don’t care where you’ve gone to college or what companies you’ve worked at…
  2. We don’t care about how much experience you have…

…as long as you’re good at your job. The aforementioned qualifiers are sometimes a good proxy, but

we’ve seen enough counter-examples that we’re skeptical.

Generally, we put “good at your job” roughly at “has been actively working in technology and

consistently progressing as a professional engineer for 3-5 years”, but the variance is wide, and if you feel otherwise compatible with the job, you should definitely apply.

Personal Attributes

  • Clear, fast, simple, frequent written communication - we’re a fully remote company and can’t really operate without these.
  • Exceedingly intentional and scrupulous to what may seem like a detriment.
  • An extreme bias to action.

What We Offer

Compensation: • Salary: $120-$200k • Equity: 0.1-1%

Growth:

We’re an early-stage startup with a consistent 40% MoM growth. As the company grows, there will be plenty of opportunities for title and job advancement. The responsibility is yours to grow into the roles that are needed

Equipment: • You’ll get $1000 to spend on home desk set up • Your pick of Apple Silicon MacBook • Premium plans for whatever AI chat services (like Claude or ChatGPT) will make you productive at your job.

Stipend: • $100/mo to spend on any educational materials • We’ll pay for job courses if you want to up skill

Work Culture: • We have two required meetings a week, a 15-minute engineering check-in on Monday and a 30-minute hangout on Friday. Everything else is ad-hoc and aims to maximize time in flow. You’ll be on pair programming calls a lot to start, but expect to have increasing amounts of time to yourself, and both the responsibility and flexibility that comes along with it. • We’re outcome-driven, not activity driven, so expect to be held to deadlines and outcomes, but not the time or effort you’ve expended.

How to Apply

• Email Spencer Shulem, our CEO, to set up a time to chat. • In whatever form you have it, show us some work that you’ve done (either descriptively or by just linking us to your code):

  • We strive for simple as possible, but not simpler. The most interesting decision that we’ve made is to use a reflected version of TypeScript that’s included as a TS plugin with the Deepkit Framework which we use for our backend. It enables us to do insanely performant and concise dependency injection and brings inline type validation to TypeScript, which has saved us an insane