GoGoGrandparent
A concierge service for seniors’ rides, meals, meds, home and more.
Senior/Staff Backend Engineer
About the role
Opportunity
We’re hiring an experienced back-end engineer - come join our innovative Silicon Valley startup with tons of opportunity to make an impact on the technology, engineering team and older adults using GoGo every day.
Working closely with our highly experienced lead engineer, you will be a senior engineer in the team. This position mostly coding with some support work and peer code reviewing. The codebase is back-end heavy with a lighter Vue.js front-end. You’ll develop new features for our product and work alongside our operations team to streamline their workflows.
The perfect applicant has some experience in software architecture & design, and is looking for greater responsibility. You should enjoy raising the standards within the team, implementing best practices and shipping robust code.
We are looking for someone who would love to make a difference in the lives of hundreds of thousands of older adults.
This role is fully remote.
Please note, the offer you receive will partially depend on your location.
Responsibilities
- Implement best practices and push for excellence in the team
- Design, develop, test, deploy, maintain and improve the code base
- Review and improve PRs
- Take responsibility for your deadlines and deliverables
- Lead by example and mentor less experienced team members
- Handling the day-to-day team operations (replying to bug reports and feature requests)
Requirements
- 5+ years of professional software development experience
- Strong experience with Node.js, Typescript and SQL
- Experience reviewing pull requests
- Produce high quality code with minimal supervision
- Have a degree in CS or related field
- Familiarity with Vue.js, GraphQL, MySQL, Docker is a plus
- Willing to work during U.S. hours with our team (4+ hours overlap with PST or EST time zones; UK time is also OK)
About the interview
The interview process is a deeper dive into technical abilities, product thinking and overall fit. For the “fit” portion, we are again looking for ownership and autonomy but we also dig deeper into communication. This is evaluated throughout the process -- in how you communicate your approach, solutions and overall thinking.
To make the most of everyone's time, we sometimes short-circuit interviews with a “no-hire”.
Initial screening call (up to 30 mins)
- Introductions
- More about GoGo
- What you are looking for
- Three very light (15 min total) live coding questions
High-level questions about your approach to engineering, past projects, etc.
Coding challenge (45 mins)
- One more in-depth live coding problem
- There are many valid ways to solve the problem
- You don’t need to know specific algorithms (e.g. how to efficiently invert a binary tree)
In-depth technical interview (up to 3 hours)
- One medium (10-20 min) live coding question
- One system design problem (15-20 mins)
- A realistic live coding challenge to implement a feature (that we have already implemented) within a slimmed-down version of our actual codebase (1-2 hours)
Meet the founders, if you haven’t already (up to 30 mins)
That’s it!
About GoGoGrandparent
We built GoGo for our own grandparents and were amazed to see it grow to touch the lives of hundreds of thousands of seniors across the United States and Canada. What shocked us then and it still does now, is that between 30 - 40% of our new signups have smartphones. We didn’t understand why. When we called and asked a few, they told us that Uber and Lyft had 'stopped working' for them.
After puzzling over that for months, we realized what the problem was.
Managing transportation - on Lyft, Uber, cab companies, etc is not easy. It’s a ‘self-serve’ experience. The ride requester has to be aware of things like the driver cancelling, getting lost, the driver arriving, the driver not-quite-being-lost-just-down-the-street-a-couple-houses.
Then add the complexities of smartphones: the user has to be on top of updating their own credit card - making sure the pickup pin is in the correct spot - typing in both where they are and where they’re going. All in all, there are about a dozen online and offline "micro steps" ride requesters have to take to get a ride. And god help anyone who needs to remember their Apple iCloud password to update an app.
We didn't know this when we started, but it turns out that ordering and managing a ride gets more difficult the older you get, almost in the same way that driving a car gets more difficult the older you get.
What gets us excited now (and what we’re hiring for) is that technically this ‘self-management problem’ doesn’t just stop at rides. There are lots of things that get harder to do as you age. People have known this for a long time and that’s inspired a lot of the solutions that older adults currently have.
Based a lot on the experiences we’ve had so far, we believe that by becoming the ‘management layer’ for the things that older adults struggle with as they age we have a better chance to offer older citizens independence without having to ask them to move out of their homes.
Within the next ten years the number of people over the age of 65 will be larger than the number of people under 18 for the first time in history. 11,000,000 people over the age of 75 will stop driving due to age related cognitive or physical decline. When they stop driving, they’ll be forced to rely on friends and family, live in a community, or have caregivers. GoGo is working to make sure that losing your youth doesn’t mean losing your independence.
Joining us at this time is a really exciting opportunity for folks looking to make meaningful impact on people’s lives. We’re a small team that’s built a profitable and fast-growing business over the last three years. Now we’re looking for partners to join us as we make GoGo a household name.
Anyone joining GoGo at this phase of the company will have a huge and life changing level of impact on a size-able and growing user base. We want people to have rich and meaningful lives at any age. We’re bringing people freedom and hope, one life at a time.
