Lead Software Engineer

LawnStarter is the nation’s leading on-demand marketplace for lawn care and related services, allowing hundreds of thousands of customers nationwide to book a service with the tap of a button. But lawn care is only the beginning - our vision is to become the one-stop shop for all home services.

Our company is flourishing at an incredible pace, profitable and achieving remarkable success. And we're not stopping there! We're actively seeking talented and hard-working individuals like you to join our team and help us achieve our ultimate vision.

What you’ll do:

As a Lead Software Engineer 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

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 2018 award 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. 

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.
• Someone who’s interested in exploring technical SEO best practices to increase organic traffic and boost search rankings. Familiarity with content optimization, website structure, or performance enhancements is a plus but not required. Extra points if you are interested in exploring AI-driven tools for automated insights!
• Bonus: Interest in exploring AI solutions to understand and optimize user behaviors across the journey would be a great addition to the team!

Our tech stack and software development process:

Most of our software is written in PHP (Laravel) and JavaScript (React, React Native, and Vue). You’ll work with these languages and possibly more as we continue to grow. We’re not worried about checking off boxes for specific languages. As long as you have a background with any mainstream object-oriented language and have a foundation of engineering fundamentals, we believe you can get up to speed with any similar language quickly.

We believe you should be empowered to own the entire life of your software, from the initial design through release and observing. And we believe you should be responsible for that software’s continued health. After all, that’s what really matters — the software needs to work correctly so users can get what they want quickly and efficiently. 

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. 

• 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
• $80-$100k USD annually. depending on experience