Job details

Founding Frontend Engineer

The Role

We want engineers who can build a team and a company, not just a best-in-class product. We believe that certainly takes broad technical competence across our tech stack, but it also takes harder to find abilities, such as…

Thinking forward from first principles and backwards from customer needs at the same time.
Curiosity about both technical and business problems.
Navigating competing priorities and tradeoffs using your own mental map of company goals.
A desire for ownership in product & team decisions.
Loving people and wanting to make your teammates around you better at their own strengths.

We think world class early-stage engineers often share some common background experience, such as:

4+ years of experience on strong software teams
Experience with the highs and lows of building new products from scratch
A track record of growth in team leadership

That said, we deeply appreciate and admire people who take initiative to pursue problems & opportunities they care about, so we are always excited to meet folks who reach out even if they don’t fit that exact profile.

Our Stack

We don’t index on how familiar candidates are with our tech stack. That’s one of the benefits of hiring excellent engineers: we’re confident you’ll get up to speed and we’re confident the rest of the team can help you do it. That said, we want everyone to be excited about the environment and tool kit they’ll have on day one.

API language: Kotlin
Embedded components: React
API framework: Ktor
Database: Postgres (RDS)
ORM: Exposed
Testing: Kotest/JUnit
CI/CD: Github Actions
Deployment: Containerized ECS service behind API Gateway
Monitoring/visibility/logging: Betterstack & Sentry

About Layer

50% of US Small Businesses fail within the first 5 years. Of those that fail, 82% cite cash flow management and visibility as the primary reason for failure. Layer is on a mission to change that.

We’re in the midst of a revolution in the way small business owners run their businesses. SMBs now run most of their core operations and business finances through SMB software platforms like Toast, Square, or Mindbody. But when it comes to doing bookkeeping and tax preparation, business owners have no choice but to flatten & export data out into a standalone accounting system, like Quickbooks. These systems are generic, confusing to use, and lack the granular data SMBs need to understand their cash flow.

Layer flips this process around and brings accounting to where the source of truth data already exists: within SMB software platforms. For business owners, this completely removes the pain of:

Importing data
Guessing what transaction categories to track
Manually reconciling several different systems just to see if you’re profitable

We’re building accounting software API-first so that it can be integrated directly into the SMB software platform where business owners already work. With Layer, small business owners get a radically better accounting experience with frictionless integration and the SMB software platforms increase customer engagement/revenue by solving this core pain point.

Since founding the company in May 2023, we’ve launched our bookkeeping product, gone live with multiple customers, and onboarded hundreds of small businesses. We’ve raised $2.3M in funding from the excellent fintech investors at BTV as well as senior executives at top SMB software companies.

But we’re just getting started. No one has ever built SMB accounting as an embeddable API. That’s why we need you!

Our Team & Culture

In person vs. remote

We love building in person and want the whole team to be together in our downtown SF co-working space. Of course with high trust comes high flexibility whenever you need it.

What we value in people

Comfort taking ownership but an inclination to collaborate. We already have norms around strong ownership and want teammates who desire to own big decisions. But we believe this works best when teammates actively seek out each other’s strengths even when doing their own work.
Enjoying the startup journey. Startups are hard no matter what, but they’re only as enjoyable as you make it. We are having fun and we don’t believe we can succeed as a team without that sense of fun, so it’s important that the whole team loves what they do each day both when success feels easy and when it doesn’t.
Caring about the product and the user. We love small businesses. We love small business owners. We believe they’re important as people, their business outcomes are important, and that our product is a big part of creating those outcomes.