🧑💻 What is this role?
Arrows is looking for an experienced Ruby on Rails developer to join our product team. This is an individual contributor role with no direct reports. This is a full-time role (~40 hours/week) in the US time zones.
Salary range: $100k to $150k per year
Stock range: .1% to .5% of the company's stock
🏹 What is Arrows?
Arrows replaces spreadsheets or project management tools with a shared onboarding plan with tasks, checklists, and email reminders. If a company sells a product that requires a bunch of steps to get up and running, Arrows helps manage that process.
We are a seed stage VC-backed startup. Our fully remote team is currently eight people. We get together in-person 2-3 times a year.
🛠️ How product gets built at Arrows
The challenges Arrows needs to solve today are in serving our customers and their users, not in technological innovation.
We work in five week cycles with a one week cooldown period. Projects within the cycle are usually one-to-two weeks in scope. Projects are lead end-to-end by a single engineer.
What does end-to-end mean?
- Map the feature
- Write a kickoff document and have a call to agree on approach
- Spike on technical and product unknowns
- Coordinate with designers to establish design requirements and needs
- Build the feature
- Document tradeoffs so others can help you choose the best path forward
- Break down project into issues so the rest of the team has visibility
- Build the frontend and backend of the feature
- Use judgement to propose adjustments and improvements to the feature, its designs, and functionality
- Get on calls to clear up unknowns and get unstuck
- Share regular updates (daily with your direct team, weekly with the rest of the company)
- Release the feature
- Review functionality and design with the team and iterate based on feedback
- Prepare a release plan (e.g. feature rollout, migration paths for existing customers)
- Coordinate with customer team on launch communication
- Push feature live and monitor for issues
An ideal candidate is excited by all aspects of this software building process, not just writing code. We’re a small team that thrives off of individuals who can take features from an idea to live on production. This is not a role where GitHub issues will be assigned to you and you churn through them.
Projects are lead end-to-end by an engineer, but are a shared effort across the entire team. There will always be aspects of any project that will require feedback, and guidance—we expect you to ask for help.
🗣️ Communication at Arrows
Arrows is a remote team and uses a few different tools for communication:
- Slack for chat
- Zoom for video calls
- Threads for longform discussion
For example, it’s common for us to move from a Slack channel to a Zoom call to hash something out, and then write a Thread to capture, share, and discuss any decisions.
Video calls are the highest bandwidth communication form we have, and are frequently used to navigate the ambiguity and uncertainty of an early stage company. We aim for calls to be collaborative and decisive, not meetings where you’re bored and checked out.
🧰 What technology is Arrows built on?
Our engineering philosophy can be summed up as “Boring Rails”—tried and true technologies utilized with minimal fuss. Read our
CTO Matt’s blog to see what we mean.
We do our best to use the latest versions of each.
Infra/Ops: Heroku, Linear, Sentry, GitHub Actions, Stripe
A big part of our product strategy and differentiation is deep integration with CRM tools so our customers don’t have to jump around between multiple tools. This means we have
non-trivial integrations with HubSpot CRM.
We try to stay on the Rails “happy path” as much as possible, and limit pulling in new dependencies unless there’s a strong business case for them. We prize the stability, predictibility, and legibility that comes with doing things the simplest way.
We expect new hires to build a few features within our established patterns and stack before proposing changes.
🤝 Who is backing Arrows?
We've raised $2.8M in funding from Gradient Ventures (Google's AI-focused venture firm) and 50 really amazing angel investors (Jeff Lawson, CEO of Twilio; Justyn Howard, CEO of Sprout Social; Jason Warner, former GitHub CTO; Michael Pryor, former Trello CEO; and many more). You can
see the full list or
read about our funding in Techcrunch.
📝 How to apply
Please email jobs@arrows.to and include some information about yourself and why you're interested the role. As you can imagine, emails that show they understand what Arrows does and why you might be a good fit really get our attention.
🤝 Interview process
- Meet a co-founder: One of our co-founders will schedule an introductory Zoom call.
- Meet the team: We'll have you meet 3-4 other members of the team.
- Test project OR Working session: Depending on the role, we'll schedule a short working session over Zoom (max 1 hour) or maybe a small at-home test project (2-8 hours, paid).
- Final call: if your test project was done at home, we'll do a call to review the work and hear your thinking.
Our goal is to make you a formal job offer or "not a good fit" decision very quickly, less than 2 weeks from start to finish, so you're not left waiting on us. So you know we’re serious: our head of marketing was made an offer within 4 days of applying.
We want to give you a great experience no matter what happens. But we're small, so please be patient and generous with your understanding if we don't meet those expectations just yet!