Senior Back End Engineer
GooseChase

Radical candor? More like radical gander, right?

Ok, enough goose puns for the moment, but now that we’ve got your attention, allow us to tell you more about this company called GooseChase and why might you want to join us!

You love an app that makes you smile, right? Well our product is a lot of fun. And even though our origins are that of a humble scavenger hunt app, we’ve now evolved (hatched?) into a super-flexible platform used by millions to create all sorts of experiences! It’s all the best parts of a scavenger hunt, with a delightful twist to keep you coming back for more.

With all that fun and flexibility, we’ve been growing like crazy. For teachers in the classroom, we’re the new “TV cart”, aka the learning tool that students legitimately look forward to. For today’s workplaces, virtual or otherwise, we help the team connect with each other to the point where they want to come into (or logon) to work. And for local cities and towns, we bring families together in a way that truly builds a sense of community.

But we’re also unique in that we don’t have any investors and, as a result, are able to put our people before profit. Seriously. We have a profit sharing program specifically for this reason! It also means we grow at the pace we want to and put the time into making this the best possible place to work. When we do something, it’s because it’s the best thing for our team and our customers, no matter what. We’ve actually been fully remote from the very beginning, because we wanted our people to have the flexibility to live wherever and however they wanted!

So what exactly is this job?

If you’re looking for impact & ownership, this is about as good as it gets. You’ll have the opportunity to take lead on our back-end tech stack going forward, charting our technical path, contributing to our product direction and helping shape the team as we grow!

From a day to day perspective, you’ll be a core member of our cross-functional product development team, focused on both the game organizer and participant experiences. Within our product team, there are no silos or artificial barriers, meaning you’ll be working closely with other engineers and designers! Whatever will help give our customers the best experience possible!

We recognize building the best products requires using the best tools, so we empower our engineers through access to the best tools and hardware available to remove barriers and enable fast iterating, robust code deployments.

In terms of technologies, you’ll be working closely with our front-end engineers as well as developing our API and async task system which:

• Is currently based on Django / TastyPie / Celery, with plans to migrate to a Node.js-based architecture (that’s where you come in!)

• Stores data in Postgresql, with images & videos in S3

• Utilizes redis and memcached for caching, session storage, and async task result storage

• Runs on Linode, switching over shortly to our new kubernetes-based cluster

• Powers our mobile applications and web-based game manager

Looking at how we work, our methodologies are:

• Continuous integration using CircleCI to empower developer autonomy and shorten development cycles

• Agile, with two week sprint cycles

• Daily async check-ins - stay connected to the team, but without zombie standups

• Project management in Asana, with our “office” taking place on Slack & Zoom - we have a very strong gif game

How do you know if this might be for you?

At GooseChase you’ll be working alongside a team of highly motivated, world-class engineers with tons of opportunities for learning, growth, and mentorship. Our product team works closely together, so we are extremely selective about who we hire to ensure the calibre of our engineering talent remains high. Be prepared to bring your ‘A’ game!

We understand that relevant experience comes in all shapes and sizes and the ability to do the job is all that matters. With that in mind, we aren’t going to put together a generic list of all the requirements that we’re looking for with this job, however, there are certain things we are looking for - specifically:

• Have you been able to collaborate & communicate successfully with others in a cross-functional team?

• Do you have very high standards for your work and desire to work with other talented people?

• Have you succeeded at architecting and implementing APIs that have been used by lots of people?

• Are you passionate about full stack development and the web ecosystem?

• Do you bring a depth of expertise in security and performance best practices?

• Are you experienced in developing production-grade web systems that are performant and fault-tolerant at scale?

• Are you based in the GMT-4 to GMT-8 time zones (North America), so you can work closely with our distributed product team?

• Can you get down with an uncomfortable amount of goose puns?

Ok the last one isn’t super work related, but we honestly do have a lot of goose puns. It’s one of our favourite parts of our culture!

We do things differently here. We’re all about fun, but also making an impact. We care deeply about working with amazing people, and have set up our company culture specifically for that - our compensation is competitive, our work environment is autonomous and collaborative, and our emphasis is on learning and growth. Put simply, it’s the type of company we actually want to work at ourselves!

So, this is us, standing in front of you, asking you to join us.

Location

North America