Lead Software Developer

LawnStarter is a marketplace that makes outdoor home services easy for homeowners while helping small businesses succeed. We've raised $25 million in venture funding and are growing fast. Are you a driven software engineer interested in helping give millions of Americans the freedom to spend time on what truly matters?

Working at LawnStarter offers you a chance to help solve the most important challenges in the home services space in an environment that’s fun, collaborative, and innovative. We are looking for smart, creative individuals who are passionate about innovation and aren't afraid to show it.

Title: Lead Software Engineer

What you’ll do:

As a Lead Software Engineering at LawnStarter, you’ll report to one of our Engineering Managers and be responsible for leading technical initiatives from inception to the hands of our users. You will be empowered to drive continuous improvement and constantly evaluate the return on investment on every decision we make when building our products. 

You’ll be in a hands-on development and technical lead role collaborating with our cross functional teams to help continue building the leading LawnStarter platform. Your focus will be architecting solutions, writing quality code, leading other engineers by example and solving technical challenges that will continue improving the experience of our users. You will become a key contributor to the codebase willing to work in any area of the code when needed. This can include JavaScript, PHP, Terraform or other backend/operations languages or technologies.

Our ability to deliver quality software to our customers in a timely, predictable manner will be directly attributable to your capacity to identify and address challenges faced by the initiatives you will be leading.  

You’ll also:

• Lead the development of LawnStarter platform ensuring that we’re utilizing the best development techniques, architectural patterns, frameworks and libraries for those initiatives
• Own and ensure the resolution of complex problems found in our systems and integrations
• Find opportunities to broadcast knowledge and lessons learned across delivery teams
• Delegate to teammates and work with them to ensure they're successful
• Identify technical debt buydown opportunities and work with the engineering management team and the product management team to prioritize these activities
• Ensure patterns are in place to provide thorough automated testing with tests at each level of the test pyramid
• Communicate patterns and solutions through both thorough written documentation and technical presentations

Requirements

What we’re looking for:

We’re looking for you if you’re an experienced, full-stack engineer. More specifically, we’re looking for:

• Someone with a fair amount of experience working on both server- and client-side web software. You should have familiarity with cloud development, why Test Driven Development (TDD) is critical while writing code, what makes an API RESTFul, what React is, what an XSS attack is, and how an MVC web framework works. That will probably mean you’ve been doing this stuff for a few years.
• Someone who understands fundamental computer science concepts. That doesn’t necessarily mean you have a CS degree. But you should be able to describe how a pointer works, what Big O notation is and how to use it, when to use composition and when to use inheritance and the differences between an array and a linked list and a set.
• Someone with a firm grasp of SQL and databases in general (including non-relational databases). You should know how to do CRUD operations, what indexes are and why they matter, and the difference between a left join and an inner join for instance.

All team members at LawnStater are expected to embody our core values which are: Be data-driven, Get shit done, People are critical, Challenge the status quo, Be scrappy, Build a great environment. 

What makes this role awesome

1 - One Team, One Heart

We believe the most significant part of any work environment is the team. That’s why we have spent a massive amount of time finding humble, hungry, and smart folks that you will get to work with every single day. That’s a huge part of the reason LawnStarter received the best places to work in the 2018, 2019, 2020 awards from the Austin-American Statesman.

2 - Growth

We have a small, tight-knit engineering team willing to give responsibility to anyone that is hungry, humble, and smart. You’ll have opportunities to own large portions of our technical direction for new features, and larger projects. You’ll get to work with a team of passionate engineers who are eager to share our knowledge and experience, and also learn from yours.

3 - High-Performance Distributed Team Environment

We are a diverse and distributed team which are passionate about the empowerment to deliver daily value to our users. We have built our core business with great unit economics and efficiency. What does that mean? Well, that allows us the opportunity to solve new and exciting challenges building innovation leading the market segment we are in. Put simply, we have unique problems being solved in a fast-paced environment but are extremely stable and able to continue investing in the future. 

We are working to be the largest outdoor home services company in the world. You in?

LawnStarter is an Equal Opportunity Employer and embraces diversity of every kind.

Benefits

• Great Culture: One of the top places to work in Austin in 2018, 2019, and 2020, and in the US in 2021, we are all about the team. That’s why we have spent a massive amount of time finding humble, passionate, and smart folks that you will get to work with every day.
• Work from the comfort of your own home
• Opportunity for growth
• 80K-100K USD annually, depending on experience