Job opportunity: first engineer

I’m seeking a talented and flexible engineer to take a significant role in building a new kind of media platform that makes writing and sharing ideas more accessible to everyone. It has ambitious goals to help people find their voice, understand and measure their influence, and improve discourse on the web.

It’s called Pinian, and you can read a little more about the motivations behind it here.

About you

You value thoughtfulness and want to move publishing on the web forward. You have multiple years experience building software at scale, and are comfortable working in all areas of the stack. You build for the present, but with an eye on the future. You know which corners can safely be cut, and which ones cannot. You’re excited to work on a greenfield project using modern technologies. You see people as humans even when you disagree with them. You have a reasonable tolerance for risk, and are able to remain calm during adverse situations, of which there will undoubtedly be a few.

Experience with any of GraphQL, React, Typescript, Go or Kubernetes is preferred, but not required. Ideally, you’d be based in San Francisco, so we could build together in person.

About me

I’ve had a decade long career building software that scales to tens of millions of users. In particular, I’ve spent the last five years building much of the team and core technology behind Medium, one of the world’s most respected media platforms. I recently left my position as a Director of Engineering there in order to work on Pinian full-time.

I value thoughtfulness, empathy, and self-awareness in my colleagues, and recognise the need to bring all kinds of people together to help me fill in my blind spots. I strongly value diversity and equal opportunity. I’m a white man and would love to build a diverse founding team that will work with me to build an inclusive product and an inclusive company.

I know my strengths and weaknesses, and I’m keen to delegate large amounts of responsibility to trusted colleagues who have expertise in their fields. I’m looking for a technical partner with whom I can get from thought to prototype to production rapidly.

You can learn more about whether I’m the kind of person you’d like to work with by reading my writing on this site, or on Twitter.

About the product

The product is a modern approach to opinion pages for the web. It is not a magazine, nor a news site. The written content will overwhelmingly come from users. It offers them the opportunity to state their positions on curated questions in meaningful topics. Think Should Britain leave the EU? Or, What should be done about homelessness in San Francisco?

Its focus will be on empowering people to publish by building on the work of others. And it will provide ways for the originators of those ideas to understand how their words spread and resonate with readers in a way that has not been possible before. Think Github, and forking, but for writing. The core differentiating mechanism adds an interesting amount of technical complexity compared to many content sites, and requires careful engineering to scale in reasonable ways.

To the best of my knowledge, there are no consumer web products that attempt to do the same kind of thing at scale, so lots of this will be pushing the boundaries of what’s possible. If you have experience with graphs, so much the better.

About the role

Engineering will be a key part of the organisation and as the first engineer you will literally be building the foundations of a product that has the potential to influence millions. I believe in a cross-functional approach to building software, where engineers have a seat at the table in product development, collaborating with designers and product owners.

As a startup, it’s hard to predict exactly what any one role will look like. We can discuss what exact areas you’d like to focus on, and whether you’d like to grow into the team’s CTO, VP Engineering, or a senior IC, but here are a some of the things you might find yourself doing early on:

• Working in a new, modern technical stack, using Typescript, React, GraphQL, and NodeJS in the frontend, with Go and GRPC in the back end, all deployed on Kubernetes using CircleCI for continuous integration, with data stored in Google Cloud Spanner.
• Solving complex technical challenges around tracing the flow of information. There will be a lot of graph-related problems to solve.
• Building a best of breed editor, on par with the likes of Medium and Dropbox Paper.
• Deploying code to production multiple times a day.
• Building data pipelines to help measure usage.
• Laying strong foundations for future engineers, and influencing the technical direction of the product.
• Participating in product brainstorms, and lots of feature development.

If this is interesting to you, please contact me by email at opportunities@pinian.co with “Pinian Engineer” in the subject line, and we can arrange a time to talk in more detail.