Senior Software Engineer (L4)

Published on September 12, 2024

At User Interviews, we believe that the best companies in the world consistently deliver products and experiences that their customers love. We also believe that the only way to consistently build those products and experiences is to talk to your customers. Watch what they do. Understand why they do what they do. Figure out why they do things that seem irrational. And once you’ve done that once, do it again. Start having constant conversations. In short, make customers your #1 priority through user research.

That’s why we exist. We help teams set up those conversations, allowing them to discover and embrace user insights. We currently do that by making it fast and easy to talk to customers, or potential customers, to help with product, design, or marketing decisions. We work with hundreds of companies every month, including user-centric organizations like Atlassian, Amazon, and Spotify.

🤠 Why Join Us

User Interviews is a fully remote team (even in the before times). We are proactive about staying connected to one another despite not sharing the same physical space. Remote culture is real, and we care about it—a lot. 

We’re a team of doers. You’ll be fully supported by your manager and team, but there won’t be anyone peering over your shoulder. You’ll be expected and trusted to take ownership of your work and to communicate clearly and transparently with your distributed teammates. 

On a related note, we’re very pro-feedback. From our users, of course. But also from each other. From individual contributors right up to the CEO, this is a team that is genuinely committed to continuous improvement. 

⭐️ About User Interviews

At User Interviews, we believe that the best companies in the world consistently deliver products and experiences that their customers love. We also believe that the only way to consistently build those products and experiences is to talk to your customers. Watch what they do. Understand why they do what they do. Figure out why they do things that seem irrational. And once you’ve done that once, do it again. Start having constant conversations. In short, make customers your #1 priority through user research. 

That’s why we exist. We help teams set up those conversations, that research, allowing them to discover and embrace user insights. We specialize in participant recruitment and management because you cannot do good research without good participants, no matter how good your other tools may be. We work with hundreds of companies every month, including user-centric organizations like Atlassian, Amazon, and Spotify.


📈 Engineering at User Interviews

You'll be joining a team that cares deeply about talking to our users, creating great experiences for them, and incorporating their feedback into everything we do. Plus, it is a chance to build a product used by your peers at world class companies. There is a fun-meta-geekiness to the whole thing that never gets old. We work in a pod structure which includes a tech lead, PM, designer, and 4 engineers. The pod works together to determine what is going to be built next, how it is going to be built, and what we need to do to execute. As an effort is underway, we rely on constant communication to ensure we're always building the best possible solution and expect our engineers to take part in that process.


🚀 What You’ll Do

As an L4 Senior Software Engineer on the team, you’ll be leading or playing a key contributing role to planning and delivery of projects.
This is a full-stack role (all our engineers are generalist full stack) but with an emphasis on backend - your expertise in backend engineering, databases, data model and API design will help shape the technical strategy of the team. But at the end of the day, our engineers do what it takes to ship product, and that occasionally involves moderate or even complex frontend work.
While our senior engineers primarily drive the technical planning and delivery (including testing, QA and release), there’s opportunity to be involved in the full product life cycle and to work cross functionally with our PMs, PDs, data scientists and UXR. Engineers get involved in helping define user requirements, offering feedback on designs, and looking at user research studies. As a senior engineer, you’ll often co-create and shape the scope (both product and technical) for the projects we take on with your product counterparts.
You’ll also get involved in improving our engineering and product organization more broadly: by contributing to our technical guilds (where React and Rails best practices are discussed), picking up areas of expertise where you become a subject matter expert (e.g. owning our db migration best practices), helping improve team processes, or by mentoring and leveling up other engineers.


📚 Our Stack
  • React, Webpack, TypeScript, and currently migrating off of SASS
  • Ruby on Rails, Sidekiq, ActiveInteraction, and RSpec
  • ElasticSearch
  • Postgres
  • Hosted on Heroku using Github for CI and automated testing

✨ Minimum Qualifications
  • 7+ years of industry experience as a full stack engineer.
  • 3+ years of current experience working on a large, complex webapp in production with Rails.
  • At least 1 year of experience working on a large, complex webapp in production with React.
  • 3+ years experience designing and independently leading large technical projects for engineering teams to work on.
  • Candidates must be located in the United States and authorized to work without any Visa sponsorship. 
 
✚ Bonus Points

  • Strong industry experience which can be added to our knowledge base
  • Ability to learn quickly and adjust based on new requirements and direction
  • A desire to influence the product in a meaningful way
  • Curiosity to constantly learn new better ways to build software
  • An interest in helping other engineers on the team learn and grow
 
🤑 Benefits

- Competitive Overall Comp {base salary + annual performance bonus}: $150k-$180k annually (based on seniority)
- Stock options for every employee
- 100% premium covered medical & dental employee coverage
- Annual membership to One Medical Group & Talkspace
- 401k + annual employer contribution
- 4 weeks of PTO to start + accrue an additional day each year
- Unlimited wellness days. Sick? Doctors appointment? Mental health day? We’ve got you covered.
- Flexible, paid parental leave
- $250 office setup budget (in addition to laptop being provided)
- $100 annual learning & development stipend
- $50/month Work From Home stipend
- Awards for 360-degree recognition, work anniversaries, & birthdays
- Annual team retreat (virtual and in-person options)


💚 We embrace what makes you, you!

We are committed to accessibility, equity, diversity, and inclusion. We build products for and welcome participants, researchers, and employees from a diverse set of backgrounds. These backgrounds include—but are not limited to—varied socioeconomic status, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, religion, race, ethnicity, age, neurodivergence, disability, and citizenship. 

As we grow, we are aware that this work is continuous. We will not settle for how things are, but rather strive for how they could be.