Engineering Leader (Founding Engineer)

About Orita 

Direct-to-consumer brands pay us, in order to market less. 

Well, technically, they pay us to market more effectively. And, strangely (!), that often means marketing a lot less.

How? We use a lot of math and a lot of machine learning to decide which people on their subscriber lists actually want to hear from them right now.

When you do this, two things happen. Brands save a ton of money. And their deliverability improves, which means they make more money because their emails land in inboxes, not in spam. Cool.

Fewer messages sent + higher chance they will be seen = ROI goes way up.

Sounds simple, right? Well, it’s not. You try getting marketers to be less market-y. It’s way easier to “play it safe” and email everyone all the time. Our math has to be that good.

But you said there would be math. Yes. We said there would be math.

And that’s where you come in. We need people with amazing neural networks in their heads to help our artificial ones do their thing. You’ll be one of the founding members of our engineering team. You’ll have a huge impact on our product, our culture, and building something great from the ground up. It will be a lot of fun. 

You will be on a team of engineers, reporting to our CEO Daniel Brady (he has a PhD in Neurobiology and has built data science teams for a decade). We look like a SaaS company, but we’re really building the data science and machine learning company to support the world’s best brands. You will work closely with our talented teams to enhance our self-service platform and drive innovation in our product offerings. 

We need your help to drive our team's growth and improve our efficiency in task delegation, resource management, and product development. This role will involve overseeing code reviews, addressing development queries, and serving as the primary liaison between engineering and our Founding Product Manager. 

As our Lead Engineer, you will

• Lead product and feature development efforts, ensuring alignment with business objectives

• Conduct code reviews and provide technical guidance to team members

• Serve as the primary engineering contact for our Founding Product Manager

• Collaborate cross-functionally to integrate new features and enhancements into our self-service platform

• Design, implement, test, deploy, and iterate on end-to-end features in our products covering both frontend and backend

• Create intuitive dashboards and user interfaces, bringing simplicity to complex user needs

• Integrations and APIs oh my: establish data feeds for our ML models and make their outputs take action in the real world

• Produce clean and well-structured code with detailed specifications and documentation

• Help maintain code quality, organization, automation, and continuous delivery

Your Ideal Background

Please apply even if you don’t meet every requirement

• Proven experience in an engineering leadership role, with a strong track record of managing a team and delivering successful projects

• A versatile builder who has built and maintained a web application from scratch 

• 6+ years of industry experience in backend development 

• Solid understanding of Python, Flask, SQL, HTML, CSS, Javascript, React.js 

• 5+ years in frontend development - you can translate complex concepts into user-friendly interfaces

• Work experience as the primary engineering point of contact for the product team

• Strong system design fundamentals and experience building scalable systems

• Proven software engineering skills in a production environment, including test-driven development

• Your code is comprehensible, well-structured, and highly performant 

• Strong sense of responsibility and ownership and own projects end to end with a bias for solving problems and shipping impactful features into production that are well tested (unit & end-to-end)

• Strong analytical and problem-solving skills

Bonus points for experience in the following:

• Experience building data-intensive applications

• Previous CTO of a startup or Founding Engineer experience

Where you’ll work: Mainly remote, ideally very close to NYC, LA, or the San Francisco Bay Area. We’re building nodes in these places, but please feel free to apply even if that isn’t your current locale. Just know that our entire team is expected to come together at least a few times per year.

Orita Offers:

The salary range for this role is $180,000 - $240,000 based on experience. Orita offers an array of benefits, including competitive salaries, healthcare, 401K matching, equity in a fast-growing startup, and a flexible PTO policy.

Orita is an Equal Opportunity Employer and does not discriminate on the basis of an individual's sex, age, race, color, creed, national origin, alienage, religion, marital status, pregnancy, sexual orientation, or affectional preference, gender identity and expression, disability, genetic trait or predisposition, carrier status, citizenship, veteran or military status and other personal characteristics protected by law. All applications will receive consideration for employment without regard to legally protected characteristics.