Apply here: StartPlaying.Games/Careeres

StartPlaying

• We are on a mission to create belonging through intimate social gaming communities. We call the hosts of these communities Game Masters AKA: GMs. And we believe being a Game Master is the best gig economy job in the world!
• We’re building what we know and ultimately want to use ourselves. (One of our founders is the OG San Francisco Game Master)
• We’re all passionate gamers (tabletop, video games, whatever!) who want to spread the joy we’ve known for years.

💜 Build Community 💜

At StartPlaying, we deeply understand...

• how to incorporate fun and play
• diversity and safety in our community are of the utmost importance
• people want a fast and easy way to play awesome games with cool humans 😎

It all starts with the right team — a team that cares deeply about values, players, Game Masters, and each other.

💥 Create massive impact 💥

For our GMs: We build tools to help the small creators, not the Matt Mercer’s of the world (though we still think he’s really cool). Many of our GMs make a living running games on StartPlaying which is creative, social, flexible, and meaningful work.

For our players: We wanted to create a world where every person, no matter where you live, or what language you speak, has a place to find GMs, other players, and games they love. Many of our players have found belonging in their StartPlaying communities. They’ve written books about their experiences, reconnected with family members, and attended each other’s weddings! (Ask us to see a clip during your interview 😊)

Today, we're solving the first step: creating a great user experience for both GMs and players in the virtual space. The next few steps are doing the same in the in-person space, and then eventually for kids! Over time, we will expand and innovate within and outside of the space.

🙌 Do the best work of your life 🙌

As a team we have an eclectic group, and we love that. We’ve created delight in every aspect of life from conventions to brick and mortar stores. We've made products at some of the top product-led organizations and shipped experiences millions of customers still use every day.

We love passionate people who are obsessive about what they do. We care about quality over quantity and working with people that inspire and excite us. We want to give you the tools, environment, team, and resources you need to do your best work.

💰 Our investors include💰

YCombinator, a16z, Sahil Lavingia, & Rahul Vohra among many others.

🤔 Sound like you? 🤔

Writes code gud:

You are a software engineer generalist and you’re good at it. You own technical architecture, enjoy identifying future needs, and ideating on solutions to help us scale. You thoroughly research and document implementation options and their trade-offs, and make the best choice. You complete your work with a high degree of quality.

Mentorship:

You enjoy pointing out code that ‘smells’, enforcing best practices/conventions, teaching new concepts, and reviewing code/coaching junior engineers through your reviews.

Technical Direction Setter:

You are a documentation god; laying the groundwork for best practices, contributing to the wiki, owning code conventions guide, and linting rules. You vet and re-vet tools and frameworks and you’re not afraid to call out the CTO on his shit!

Glue:

You are a great teammate and usually the glue for your team. Doing the needed, but often invisible, tasks to keep the team moving forward and shipping their best work. Working behind the scenes to expedite the most important projects and ensure that they cross the finish line. (Learn more here)

Have taken the Oath of Growth:

You have a growth mindset. You give and receive feedback well without being combative or getting defensive, take accountability for your mistakes and choose to learn from them, and you approach subjects and issues with curiosity.

Problem solver:

You excel at understanding and solving complex problems, identifying tech pain points, and thinking about future implications of a solution/feature. You also have incredible attention to detail.

Communication enthusiast:

You have strong communication (written and verbal) and can use that ability to effectively communicate and collaborate with a diverse range of people and job functions.

Authentic:

You bring your authentic self to work and are able to have fun, not take yourself too seriously, and genuinely love what you do.

💻 Role 💻

• StartPlaying is a web-based product. (just fyi 🙃 )
• Champion the best engineering practices and build excellent engineering culture within the organization.
• Help estimate, plan, and execute projects, features, and integrations.
• Own and deliver technical projects from the planning stage through shipping.
• Work with CTO to define the overall technical architecture for major parts of the product, focusing on the user experience.
• Lay the groundwork for and help maintain engineering guidelines, processes, and coding standards.
• Continually grow your technical skills to solve our hardest technical challenges around quality, performance, robustness, and reliability.
• Laugh at CEO’s poor attempts at humor.
• Use modern tools and frameworks to develop new product functionality.
• Use and develop your skills as a mentor and technical leader to help build up junior engineers.
• Perform design and code reviews and advise/mentor junior engineers.
• Understand how key technical decisions will drive business outcomes.
• Contribute to the product process: thinking through UX, beautiful UI, and connecting with customers to solve their problems.
• Actually writing code!

Requirements

Experience:

Apply here: StartPlaying.Games/Careeres

• 5+ years of full-stack development experience
• Prior mentorship experience
• Languages: TypeScript/JavaScript, PostgreSQL, GraphQL or REST, React

Nice to haves:

• AWS
• Startup Experience

Technologies we use:

• Languages: TypeScript, PostgreSQL, GraphQL, React, Next.js
• Tools: Linear, GitHub, AWS (Lambda, RDS, S3, CloudWatch), Notion, Discord, Zoom

🤔 What is it really like working at StartPlaying? 🤔

• We're a fully remote company. We don't care much about "work signaling" — we care about tangible output.
• We try not to take ourselves too seriously. Our Discord is filled with frequent memes, gifs, and music posts.
• We critique each other's work, give constructive feedback, and intently listen when others speak.
• We love to celebrate each other! Whether it's customer love, a work milestone, or a major life event — praise is fundamental at StartPlaying. The best part: figuring out how to surprise and delight your teammates!
• We come from eclectic and diverse backgrounds and we respect and openly teach each other about those backgrounds.
• We love adding easter eggs to the site or internal documentation.
• We listen, if you have ideas on making the company better we want to hear them
• We are building the company and the product simultaneously. So if you want to build a cool product and help build a company you’ve come to the right place!

🎁 Benefits 🎁

✅ Taking Care of Your Future ✅

• Medical, dental and vision insurance: 100% coverage for you, 50% coverage for all your dependents.
• Voluntary insurance: short-term disability, long-term disability, and life insurance.
• 401(k) plan through Slavic401(k).
• Free access to OneMedical, Health Advocate, and Teladoc
• Click here for a benefits overview

🏝 Generous Time Off 🏝

• Take as much vacation as you like (no less than 2 weeks!)
• All Federal holidays, plus Thanksgiving and Winter Break.
  • We’re flexible on individuals moving their time off to align with their celebrated holidays.
• Flexible parental leave
• One free nerd convention (of your choosing) + one company-sponsored offsite/trip per year

✍️ Investing in Your Growth ✍️

• We budget for your professional development.
• We do an optional company “book club”. We read books together and discuss if/how to implement some of the ideas into the company.
• We do team-building activities and seminars together.

💯 Setting You Up For Success 💯

• Custom MacBook Pro.
• $1000 budget for workstation setup (not including your MacBook)
• Flexible spending accounts for commuter costs, dependent care, and healthcare expenses.

At StartPlaying, we value diversity. We are an equal-opportunity employer: we do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability status. (We shouldn’t have to say that, but we, unfortunately, have to)

Apply here: StartPlaying.Games/Careeres