### The Role
We want engineers who can build a team and a company, not just a best-in-class
product. We believe that certainly takes broad technical competence across our
tech stack, but it also takes harder to find abilities, such as…
* Thinking forward from first principles and backwards from customer needs at the same time.
* Curiosity about both technical and business problems.
* Navigating competing priorities and tradeoffs using your own mental map of company goals.
* A desire for ownership in product & team decisions.
* Loving people and wanting to make your teammates around you better at their own strengths.
We think world class early-stage engineers often share some common background
experience, such as:
* 4+ years of experience on strong software teams
* Experience with the highs and lows of building new products from scratch
* A track record of growth in team leadership
That said, we deeply appreciate and admire people who take initiative to
pursue problems & opportunities they care about, so we are always excited to
meet folks who reach out even if they don’t fit that exact profile.
### Our Stack
We don’t index on how familiar candidates are with our tech stack. That’s one
of the benefits of hiring excellent engineers: we’re confident you’ll get up
to speed and we’re confident the rest of the team can help you do it. That
said, we want everyone to be excited about the environment and tool kit
they’ll have on day one.
* API language: **Kotlin**
* Embedded components: **React**
* API framework: **Ktor**
* Database: **Postgres (RDS)**
* ORM: **Exposed**
* Testing: **Kotest/JUnit**
* CI/CD: **Github Actions**
* Deployment: **Containerized ECS service behind API Gateway**
* Monitoring/visibility/logging: **Betterstack & Sentry**
### About Layer
50% of US Small Businesses fail within the first 5 years. Of those that fail,
82% cite cash flow management and visibility as the primary reason for
failure. [Layer](http://layerfi.com/) is on a mission to change that.
We’re in the midst of a revolution in the way small business owners run their
businesses. SMBs now run most of their core operations and business finances
through SMB software platforms like [Toast](https://pos.toasttab.com/),
[Square](https://squareup.com/us/en), or
[Mindbody](https://www.mindbodyonline.com/). But when it comes to doing
bookkeeping and tax preparation, business owners have no choice but to flatten
& export data out into a standalone accounting system, like Quickbooks. These
systems are generic, confusing to use, and lack the granular data SMBs need to
understand their cash flow.
Layer flips this process around and brings accounting to where the source of
truth data already exists: within SMB software platforms. For business owners,
this completely removes the pain of:
* Importing data
* Guessing what transaction categories to track
* Manually reconciling several different systems just to see if you’re profitable
We’re building accounting software API-first so that it can be integrated
directly into the SMB software platform where business owners already work.
With Layer, small business owners get a radically better accounting experience
with frictionless integration and the SMB software platforms increase customer
engagement/revenue by solving this core pain point.
Since founding the company in May 2023, we’ve launched our bookkeeping
product, gone live with multiple customers, and onboarded hundreds of small
businesses. We’ve raised $2.3M in funding from the excellent fintech investors
at [BTV](https://www.btv.vc/about-us) as well as senior executives at top SMB
software companies.
But we’re just getting started. No one has ever built SMB accounting as an
embeddable API. That’s why we need you!
### Our Team & Culture
**In person vs. remote**
We love building in person and want the whole team to be together in our
downtown SF co-working space. Of course with high trust comes high flexibility
whenever you need it.
**What we value in people**
* **Comfort taking ownership but an inclination to collaborate.** We already have norms around strong ownership and want teammates who desire to own big decisions. But we believe this works best when teammates actively seek out each other’s strengths even when doing their own work.
* **Enjoying the startup journey**. Startups are hard no matter what, but they’re only as enjoyable as you make it. We are having fun and we don’t believe we can succeed as a team without that sense of fun, so it’s important that the whole team loves what they do each day both when success feels easy and when it doesn’t.
* **Caring about the product and the user.** We love small businesses. We love small business owners. We believe they’re important as people, their business outcomes are important, and that our product is a big part of creating those outcomes.
### Benefits
* Competitive seed-stage salary
* Founding team equity
* Health/dental/vision
* An employee friendly equity plan
* Lunch in-office
