Job Description: Founding Engineer
Location: Hybrid (New York, NY)
About Gaia K-12
Gaia K-12 is on a mission to empower school nutrition directors to focus on creating healthy and delicious meals by providing easy to use solutions that work for them. We are building next-generation tools that will transform the way public school cafeterias operate and empower child nutrition teams to serve nutritious, delicious, and appealing food to students of all ages.
Opportunity
We are seeking a Founding Engineer for our Technology team, reporting to the CTO. As a Founding Engineer, you will play a critical role in shaping the technological direction and key components of our company from the ground up. You will work closely with the founders to build, scale, and optimize our product/platform, while fostering a collaborative and creative work environment. You’ll also work directly with our advisors and customers to hear their challenges first-hand and show how the solutions we’re building can help them. This is a unique opportunity to leave your mark from the very beginning of a new product and help shape the future of public school nutrition.
Our Technology
Our platform leverages tools like Node, TypeScript, Prisma, MySQL, Redis, Docker, and ElasticSearch to power our functionality, along with ReactJS and MaterialUI on the front-end to create beautiful and accessible interfaces. We are a 100% cloud-native platform hosted in AWS and utilize tools like Terraform to efficiently and reliably build, maintain, and scale our infrastructure. We rely on code reviews, pull requests, automated code scans (with tools like Snyk), and automated CI/CD pipelines to test and deploy frequently, and monitor application performance using tools like Datadog.
We believe in autonomy for our teammates to make their own decisions, in being customer-obsessed and empathetic, in being transparent and collaborative, and in being endlessly curious.
What We’re Looking For
We’re looking for someone who:
- Has held engineering roles at a minimum of two companies
- Can demonstrate expertise across the full software stack, both frontend and backend
- Has experience building applications with Node and related frameworks like RedwoodJS, NestJS, ExpressJS, or other web frameworks
- Can build beautiful, usable, accessible user interfaces using technologies like ReactJS or NextJS and design frameworks like MaterialUI or Ant Design.
- Loves working directly with customers to hear about their challenges and help design solutions for them
- Can design highly performant, secure, scalable, cloud-native solutions from the ground up based on problem statements and requirements
- Has demonstrated experience designing and evolving relational data models
- Prioritizes delivery speed and “done” over “perfect”
- Bonus points for experience with natural language processing technologies, data science, or AI/ML.
Timeline
After 3 months…
You’ll have gone through our onboarding and gone deep into the details of school nutrition programs and their day-to-day challenges around data, operations, and compliance. You’ll have expanded our early foundations of our SaaS platform and worked with the CTO and engineering team to make and implement key design decisions. You’ll be executing on getting critical functionality built, tested, and deployed.
After 6 months…
As you continue to work with the team on delivering expanded platform functionality, you’ll work directly with our customers to help them get implemented and launched. You’ll lay out new roadmaps and decisions based on learnings and retrospectives and implement new features and use cases.
After 12 months…
You’ll be a key leader as we grow the team and hire additional engineers. As we continue to deliver new functionality to the market, you’ll be a key player in the design, development, and launch of the technology that powers it.
What We Offer
- $170k base salary
- Company equity 0.5-1.0%
- Healthcare, dental, and vision benefits, fully covered for employees and 70-100% for dependents
- Smart, supportive coworkers who truly care about you
- Hybrid work environment - 2 days/week in our NYC office
- Whatever computing horsepower you’d like - Macbook Pro, Dell XPS, Commodore 64, etc.
Ready to Join?
If this role sounds like a fit, please apply! Do you check some of the boxes above, but are hesitant to apply because you haven’t used some of our specific technologies? Apply anyway - we are looking for smart, ambitious teammates who are problem solvers at heart. If this sounds like you, we look forward to hearing from you!
