Startup Engineer (Full stack developer)

Reports to: Founder/CEO of Swell

Responsible for: Product delivery, devops, technical stewardship

Works closely with: Our chief technical advisor & our therapists

Compensation: $55K-60K* annual salary plus performance bonus, stock options, & benefits

Location: Louisville, Kentucky (preference will be given to candidates in Louisville, though we will consider remote in Kentucky w/ frequent travel to the Louisville office)

Apply Here

About Swell

Swell is building an AI-supported mental health platform for the people who can’t afford to pay hundreds out of pocket for therapy (starting with military families).

We all want less people to struggle with their mental health, but unfortunately the demand for therapy has outstripped the global supply of therapists. Very few of those left accept any insurance at all, especially the military’s.

As a result, the most in-need people can’t get help in the 1:1 model now, and millions more who struggle with more mild symptoms are totally left out. Swell is solving that.

What makes us unique in addition to our target market is our full-circle approach to mental healthcare. We’ll meet each person exactly where they are by combining totally new categories of self-guided preventative & early interventional mental health care with traditional 1:1 therapy in one platform.

We launched our video therapy marketplace at our first base (Fort Campbell) in January of last year. Since then we’ve grown over ~12X, secured contracts with major insurers, and facilitated nearly 2000 therapy sessions with military families on our platform.

Now, we’re building out the proprietary self-guided side of our therapy app. This app uses behavioral psychology & AI and to help clients learn skills and frameworks for improving their relationships with themselves and others outside of a 1:1 session.

About the Role

We're a small startup (4 full time employees) with a team that’s very passionate about mental health. We’re looking for a full stack founding software engineer (first full time eng on the team) who wants to grow with Swell. Our ideal candidate has aspirations of moving into a tech lead (or beyond) role and demonstrates a dedication to personal development.

This person would report into our CEO (Rachel) & Chief Technical Advisor (Jim).

Rachel has a technical product background with experience across marketplaces and healthtech (former Lyft, Kinsa, Athos). She owns the Product roadmap (where there’s a lot of opportunity for collaboration).

Jim is a senior engineering manager at Google (former Microsoft, Verve, Two Sigma) and in addition to leading architecture design & general technical oversight, he’ll be mentoring & directly supporting professional development for whoever takes this role.

Our strong preference is for this role to be in-person out of our Butchertown/Nulu office with the option for some remote days over time. Rachel also works out of the Louisville office along with the other new hire we’re looking for. With that said, we’re allowing some flexibility for the right candidate.

We will consider applicants from Lexington and other areas in KY who would be mostly remote and would work out of the Louisville office several days per month and consider ultimately relocating.

Minimum Requirements:

• Must be passionate about mental health and invested in Swell’s vision.
• Must have experience as an engineer - can be a newer a CS or bootcamp grad.
• Must always be learning & have a curious mindset.
• Must be incredibly resourceful. You don't get to dead-ends of "I don't know", you instead believe "I can figure anything out".
• Proficiency in TypeScript.
• Basic exposure to AWS/comparable cloud hosting providers.
• Must be willing to familiarize yourself and build within our stack.

Tech Stack:

• React (web)
• React Native (mobile)
• Node.js
• Next.js
• TypeScript
• GraphQL (we have plans to deprecate this)
• Postgres
• SQL
• Github/AWS(S3, CloudFront, Fargate, SES, RDS)

What you’ll do here:

• Write code & push it to production every day
• Perform build vs. buy analysis, selecting 3rd party libraries and software vendors.
• Maintain technical documentation
• Identify & burndown tech debt
• Debug issues
• Own the development process (make it better for yourself and the next generation of engineers we hire)
• Plan/scope work, providing increasingly realistic development timelines over time
• Communicate effectively with the team and bring engineering issues to light quickly
• Contribute ideas and roll up your sleeves for projects outside of engineering

Engineering Opportunities:
We currently have a video therapy marketplace application in production. This consists of a webapp for therapists and a mobile app for clients. Our fully automated devops pipeline and modern cloud platform supports rapid, toil-free development, and you’ll have the opportunity to design and expand additional platform infrastructure as the need arises.

Core features that need improvement are: scheduling, onboarding flow, cancellation flow, user engagement and psychoanalytic tools (e.g. daily journaling)

New features that will be implemented next are: automated email/sms notifications, auto-therapist notes, product analytics

After we make some essential progress on our current product (setting our team up for our growth goals), we’ll get to work on our innovative self-guided therapy system, which will give you the opportunity to build an end-to-end rich content editor and publishing suite , work with 3rd party GenAI libraries, build experimentation systems (e.g. A/B testing), etc.

About you

• You see the tremendous value and impact that improving mental health will have in our world. You share Swell’s vision and want to be a part of making it a reality.

• You thrive in a highly accountable, highly visible environment. (We all know exactly what everyone is working on and every person is responsible for meeting deadlines and moving Swell forward.)

• You take initiative. You see a problem, you get into the arena and lead the fix.

• When thinking about the way things are done, you’re willing to challenge norms and ask “how can this be better?” to improve the status quo.

• You have a high EQ and work well with others who do. You are a clear, proactive, and respectful communicator. You respond well to thoughtful, direct feedback.

• You’re ready to be all in on shaping the future at Swell, contributing to discussions around how we work, how we get better, and how we right the ship when we inevitably take a wrong turn.

• You want to work in a startup and grow with Swell. You want to see our product in the world. You want to work on tough problems. You’re ready for a high-growth, energy-intensive phase in your life (that’s what the next 3 years at Swell will be like).

Benefits

• Equity ownership in Swell

• Medical, dental, and vision benefits

• 11 company-wide observed holidays + 1 floating personal holiday (to celebrate individual cultural and religious holidays)

• 3 weeks paid time off (2 are company wide - one in the winter and one in the summer)

• Rare opportunity for direct 1:1 mentorship from a Senior Staff Engineer at Google and former startup VP of Engineering (2x successful exits)

*Note on salary - to keep things fair and balanced across our team, we decide on compensation for roles upfront and then communicate it transparently. This way salaries aren’t dependent on negotiating skills or subjective traits that leave room for bias. At Swell, salaries are standardized for each role and level within the team, and printed on the job post.

This position starts at $55K for a bootcamp or CS grad, and $60K for someone with at least 2 years of experience. There’s an additional $10K company performance bonus and a generous stock option grant (0.25%). For more experienced applicants, we’ll increase the bonus & stock package.

The company performance bonus is based on achieving key company milestones, ensuring that everyone contributes to and benefits from Swell's success.

Equal Opportunity
Individuals of all colors, backgrounds, religions (or lack thereof), sexual orientations, and gender identities who are passionate about helping people bring about meaningful, measurable change in their lives are encouraged to apply.

Apply Here