I’m Josh, a cofounder at CampusOptics. We’re building a first-of-its-kind safety platform for distributed campuses, starting in higher education. We enable teams to see the big picture, stay on top of the small details, and prevent harm on their campus.

I’m looking to bring on a full-stack engineer to work closely with me to advance the foundation of the product, the codebase, and engineering team. In the early days, we’re all individual contributors, but the right candidate could easily move into technical leadership or people management as the team grows.

About the Job

From a technical perspective, we want to deliver large amounts of value as quickly and sustainably as possible, and we use technologies that enable that aim. Out of the gates, that has meant relying heavily on Ruby on Rails, PostgreSQL, and Stimulus (with Typescript). And on the mobile side, we use React Native to deliver an iOS + Android app. Lastly, for infrastructure, we use Elastic Beanstalk within AWS, managed via Terraform.

You don’t need experience in all of these, but we need someone who can come in and make initial contributions in at least one of these areas, with a willingness to learn others where it makes sense. And whether in these technologies or not, we’d love new ideas and suggestions from your own experience to unlock possibilities we might have missed until now.

Over the course of your first year, you’ll solve or collaborate on problems like:

• Scaling our infrastructure to handle 10x its current data
• Designing engineering practices to increase speed and quality, even as we grow
• Enhancing our interactive maps and geospatial capabilities
• Encoding complex workflows and notifications around inspections, issue remediation, and incident logging

Here are a few of the principles that have guided our engineering efforts thus far, which might help you imagine what it would be like to work together:

• Achieving and celebrating ambitious goals for our customers, company, and team
• Ensuring a development process and test suite that gives us a high degree of confidence in shipping master to production
• Maintaining a standardized codebase where experiments and ideas can bloom and are summarily removed when they weren’t the right call

Currently, the entire CampusOptics team is working remotely. It remains to be seen whether this change will be temporary or permanent, so we’re currently preferring candidates living in or eventually willing to relocate to Austin.

About CampusOptics

Nearly 15 years ago, one of our cofounders was involved in a tragic fire on his college campus, and he lost 3 of his friends. He learned later that those lives could have been saved had the house’s safety equipment functioned correctly. In the intervening years, some institutions have adopted technology to help with some aspects of their safety programs, but most programs are still run by brittle spreadsheets and institutional knowledge.

While his story was the genesis of CampusOptics, 18 months of market research and product development show that this is both a meaningful mission and a badly-needed product. We’ve heard from hundreds of institutions and implemented multiple customers whom you have certainly heard of.

A startup is always a risk, but our team has significant experience and a strong track record starting and building successful software companies in higher ed, and our early customers are raving fans.

How to Apply

Email me at [email protected], and let me know a little about yourself, what interests you, and why you might be a fit. The interview process will consist of 4 steps:

* 30-45 minutes - An introductory phone call or virtual coffee to talk more about your skills and background and let you ask any questions you have.
* 60-90 minutes - A deeper technical call, over video, to talk tech together. This isn’t live coding, it’s just time for us to go deeper on our own experiences and preferences in common technologies.
* 2-4 hours - A take-home technical screen in the form of a contrived Github repo for us to work on together.
* 30-60 minutes - You’ll have a chance to meet other team members, including Joe, who is our CEO and a cofounder. 

By then, we should all have a good idea if there’s a mutual fit, and we’ll see if working together makes sense.

I look forward to hearing from you, and don’t hesitate to contact me directly if you have any questions at all.