Engineer #1

Livedocs is looking for a founding engineer (employee #2) to join our team. In this role, you will work closely with the founder and product team to build a next-generation office suite for modern teams.

This role is for somebody aligned with our vision to build a world-class product that democratizes access to solid data infrastructure, is hungry to earn an above-market equity stake, and can rapidly build at the pace of a quickly-growing startup.

Livedocs is backed by some of the best investors in Silicon Valley, like General Catalyst, Khosla Ventures, PJC, Unshackled Ventures, YCombinator, Pioneer, and more.

As a hacker, you have many options. You want to work at Livedocs because you:

• Believe in Livedocs' vision for empowering small teams to deliver world-class customer experiences by leveraging their data to make better decisions without having to write code/SQL (think, "Vercel for data stacks")
• Desire the impact and freedom that come with being the first or second full-time engineer, with the option of growing into a management or architect role
• Know the data engineering space quite well, and know that the current state of the tooling is ripe for positive disruption!
• Operate outside the instruction manual — Not afraid to break new ground where an existing solution doesn't exist. And are surrounded by colleagues who think the same way.

Responsibilities

• Taking ownership of all our codebase, including the web app, microservices, and a particular focus on our backend data sync engine (written in Typescript with Postgres and Sequelize)
• Full-stack web development with typescript, node, graphql, nextjs, and postgres
• Building ETL workflows (Readers and loaders), setting up and managing data infrastructure (particularly Redshift, DBT, etc
• Building and managing microservices and integrations between Livedocs and third-party APIs/DBs
• Cross-datastore queries: You'll build Livedocs' visual query interface that abstracts over disparate data stores, including customer databases. Database expertise is not required, but you should be comfortable writing and optimizing SQL.
• If you wish to grow into a management role, you'll also make hiring decisions and own engineering culture.

About You

• You have 3+ years of experience as a professional software engineer.
• You have experience writing high-quality Typescript, Node, and NextJS code and are familiar with PostgreSQL and Apollo GraphQL
• You have experience or interest in building data pipelines and/or setting up data stacks with tools like Redshift, Apache Airflow, transformations with DBT, etc

We're looking for engineers who enjoy talking to customers, iterating & shipping quickly, and show a strong sense of ownership and autonomy.

Our small teams of engineers broadly define and drive their roadmap and use their product sense to define and ship an MVP. We are a sustained high-performance team.

We are regularly pushed out of our comfort zones. A lot is asked of us: excellence in our work, solving hard challenges, 100% accountability for our actions, and an ownership mentality (often requiring long hours and the infrequent sync on weekends). We rest and recover when needed but make ourselves available if we are the blocker on a key task.

Our team is a low-ego environment, and we are all aligned that we are a humble group of hackers and tinkerers who have set out to build the Vercel for data stacks.

Below is what to expect in our interview process. If you have questions, email Arsalan at a@livedocs.com

Phone Screen (25 mins)

This stage is a more informal call to get to know more about the role, and for you to evaluate whether it's a good fit for you. We are looking for people with a strong interest in startups and motivation to help them; this is usually exhibited by past experience working at or starting one yourself.

Lastly, the conversation will cover some light technical discussion about your past projects. Mostly, we want to know that you can code and ship fairly involved systems, and speak to them with clarity on the details. This tends to be a good indication that an engineer had strong ownership and showed autonomy in making a product or technical decisions.

Technical interview (async over a single day)

You'll be using your own computer and tools, but working with a minimal codebase we provide you. It's a typescript codebase and a setup aimed to replicate the environment we use in production. We even designed it to be similar to a problem you'd work on frequently at Livedocs.

We will check in over Slack/email every 20 minutes while you are working on this problem (we can also schedule a 30 minute slot if you prefer to ask questions synchronously), and you can submit a solution via a PR by the end of the day.

Product thinking interview (45 minute call)

This is a feature experiment proposal that you will make. Typically this is something you should be able to do by this far in the process. Feel free to use a few slides, or a FigJam, etc to pitch the feature to us.

The discussion will mainly revolve around the implementation, UX, UI, and purpose of the feature, and you may need to ask some questions for more context to the team in the days leading up to this step of the interview.

Timing

The typical interview process takes a month from start to finish, but we tend to match your cadence and can move faster or slower based on your availability. We have moved more quickly and look to accommodate candidates who might have a short timeline or competing offers.

After the first two interviews, we sometimes short-circuit the process with a "no-hire." We have found that going through the entire process gives us enough to make a go/no-go decision.