Founding Engineer, Backend/Infrastructure

San Francisco or Remote (US/Canada) | Engineering | Full-time

We're looking for a senior engineer (4+ years of experience) to join our founding team!

Apply by emailing [email protected]

About Dispatch

The product

Dispatch protects your attention from the flood of digital inputs throughout the day so that you can focus on your most important work. We're building a unified priority inbox for all notifications — starting with the worst offender: Slack.

Once we solve this burning need for Slack power users, we’ll expand to other notification streams: Jira, GitHub, Confluence, Notion, Asana, Google Docs, etc.

The problem

The amount of data that we produce is growing astronomically.

Ask yourself — how much information do you parse through everyday? How many messages, emails, notifications? We have the same hardware as our ancestors (🧠), yet we have to process orders of magnitude more information than they did.

You'll be joining a small team backed by top Silicon Valley investors to tackle the problem of distraction at a transformative stage of the company. We're working with hungry early users to iterate on the product, and stress test reliability/performance with high volumes of data. There are many engineering challenges ahead of us, and we're excited to build a team of talented and thoughtful people to tackle them.

The role

If you're excited about tools for focus and attention, and have experience building early-stage products we'd be delighted to meet you! You'll be working directly with the founders 👋🏼 to build on an early version of Dispatch and take it to public launch and beyond.

What you'll achieve

• Drive major technical decisions and have an outsized impact at an early-stage company.
• Design, build and operate scalable backend systems and services that power a high volume messaging product.
• Work with our security team to build improvements that help keep Dispatch secure.
• Improve engineering standards, tooling, and processes. Have opinions about CI/CD and testing tools? We'd love to hear them.

What we're looking for

• 4+ years of experience building scalable backend services
• Familiarity with some of our existing technology and deployment stack - our current backend is a motley blend of AWS (Aurora Postgres, SNS, SQS), Heroku, Vercel (serverless, Node.js)
• Worked on production-level projects with serverless and events-driven architecture

Nice to have experiences

• Working with Slack apps and the Slack Events API

What will help you succeed

• Comfortable in a dynamic fast-paced environment — We're a small and agile company where ideas change and become reality in a matter of days if not hours.
• Autodidactic — As our product evolves, there'll be many new things to learn. We're looking for ambitious self-starters who are eager to build expertise in areas our growing team needs.
• Growth-oriented and thoughtful about giving and receiving feedback — We want to create an environment where people are stoked to do their best work. How can your teammates help you achieve that?
• Able to clearly communicate technical and product ideas — Disagreements happen and it's important that you are able to explain your perspective so that we can arrive at the best solutions as a team.
• User focused and critically optimistic about technology — You're excited about the potential of what we can build together, but mindful of the implications and how it shapes real people's lives.

More excited about product engineering? Check out ****Founding Engineer, Full Stack

Working at Dispatch

⏱️ Protected focus time — We operate on the maker's schedule. The few meetings we have are planned around focus blocks and efficiently run.

🤸🏻 Flexible work schedule — Fancy a midday bike ride or prefer working nights? We take advantage of our small team and few meetings by working hours when we can be at our best.

📓 Writing and documentation — From planning/proposing (specs), executing (work logs), to evaluating (post-mortems, analytics), we write everything down. Documenting decisions not only creates a shared reality for the company, but allows more people to participate in the conversation and give their opinions asynchronously.

🏗️ Do less, well — There are infinite things to build and do, so it's important that we ruthlessly prioritize projects with the most impact. This means doing fewer things, but doing them well.

🍻 Disagree and commit — There isn't always a correct choice when it comes to product or technical decisions. Even when discussions get heated we always move forward (and fast!) together.

☀️ Rigor — How you do one thing is how you do everything. Whether it's a code review or writing up an agenda for a meeting, we take pride in being thorough and bringing energy to every task.

📣 Direct feedback — We make space to talk about problems and improve working relationships during regular 1:1s. We assume good intentions and treat feedback as a gift.

We hope you'll join us.

Apply by emailing [email protected]