Full-stack Engineer at useful.app – Austin, Texas

What is Useful?

We’re on a mission to bring companies closer to their customers. That’s why we’re building Useful—AI coaching and deal intelligence for sales managers and their teams. Useful listens to calls to provide feedback and insights about conversations with customers, enabling managers and reps to appreciate what works well, and understand the opportunities to work even better with customers.

We believe that behind every great player, is a great coach, and that great coaching helps people become the best version of themselves.

We’re starting with go-to-market teams in our pursuit of making people into superheroes in every customer-facing role. We’re growing rapidly with customers and already working closely with some of the fastest-growing companies in SaaS, including Zip, RudderStack, Embrace, Assembled, Vividly, and many more – and we’re just getting started!

Founded in 2022, we’re supported by leading investors including Spark Capital, Unusual Ventures, Comma Capital, and angel investors who were/are founders or executives of leading companies—including Apple, Meta, Stripe, Datadog, Notion, Robinhood, Klaviyo, Twilio, Toast, Asana, Braze, Hubspot, Plaid, Carta, Ramp, and more. The Useful team comprises talented individuals and startup veterans from top technology companies and universities.

About the Role

We’re building a product that people love. One that builds trust, helps companies grow closer to their customers, and unlocks the growth potential of millions of people in customer-facing roles.

What matters to us is what we enable for others. We focus on the details of everything we do, so businesses around the world can focus on what’s most important to them.

Useful is, at its core, an engineering company, intentional about building the best engineering team. We are looking for a remarkable full-stack engineer who is excited to be a part of our early story and help us build a world-class community. We are engineers with a broad set of technical skills and backgrounds, who are eager to solve a wide range of engineering challenges.

Our ideal candidate has a strong understanding of building backend systems, sound judgment about tradeoffs, a willingness to contribute full stack, an extremely strong sense of ownership, and loves delivering customer impact by owning projects from inception through production.

What You’ll Do

• Ship code to production and impact our users’ lives every day
• Build new product capabilities by breaking down complex projects into bite-sized scopes that are fast and fun to implement
• Continuously improve our engineering processes, tools, and systems that allow us to scale our code, productivity, and team
• Inspire and mentor fellow engineers and interns
• Push the frontier of practical applications of new AI, such as implementing novel use cases and workflows that push the limits of what’s possible with transformer-based models

It’s early in our journey, so you'll have an opportunity to shape not only our product, but the company itself: how we work together, what makes us stand out, and who we hire.

What you Need

• 3+years of professional engineering experience (at least 1 year at a startup)
• Professional experience building a complex web application from the ground up, including some frontend contributions
• Stellar communication skills with a knack for working effectively in a very fast-paced environment
• Strong debugging and performance optimization skills
• An obsession with product performance, meticulousness and end-user experience
• Undergrad CS or technical/STEM degree

Nice to Haves

• Experience coding in Python, Golang, and/or Typescript
• Experience with AWS services
• Experience with Next.js and React 18
• Experience with a document/no-SQL db
• Knowledge of foundational ML and deep learning

You’ll be a Great Fit if you…

• Have a need for speed and a bias for impact. You love to get product updates in customers’ hands ASAP.
• Are intellectually curious. You’re not afraid to try new things and have a growth mindset.
• Take pride in your craft but don’t hesitate to ask for help. You operate with integrity and follow through on commitments.
• Enjoy working on complex problems across the stack and building features end-to-end

How we work and live

With team members in Austin and New York, we regularly gather to connect in person, solve problems and learn from each other! We are a tight-knit community bound by our shared curiosity, humility with growth mindsets, humor, ambition for personal impact, passion for great engineering, and obsession with our customers’ success.

We use Golang, Python, and Typescript. Github, Linear, and Notion for our planning, deployment, docs, and collaboration. Our infra primarily runs on AWS, using Terraform with services like ECS, S3, Dynamo, OpenSearch, SQS, and Lambdas/Step Functions. We utilize Pinecone’s vector db, Anthropic, OpenAI, Algolia, and a bleeding edge toolset for ML/AI-related capabilities. We have to be able to build things quickly to support the fastest growing startups and platforms in the world, while also being reliable and trustworthy.

We offer wellness stipends, education support, flexible PTO, and more to support your personal growth and wellbeing!

What to expect in the interview process

We are grateful and appreciate your willingness to spend time with us so we can mutually determine that the role is a strong fit for you! We are available to answer any and all questions throughout the course of our interview process, outlined below.

Introduction call (30min)

Conversation over Zoom with Carter, co-founder and co-CEO, to discuss the role and your interests, goals and experience.

Coding exercises (2 x 60min)

Two live coding sessions over Zoom–one backend, one frontend–each with a member of our Engineering team. These are practical, straightforward opportunities that help us understand how you solve problems, communicate, your programming proficiency, and your approaches to abstractions, organizing code, and debugging. Nothing obscure, no gotchas.

System architecture interview (60min)

A whiteboard exercise over Zoom to help us understand your approach to tradeoffs, risks, pragmatism, as well as knowledge and thought process for distributed systems and application design, data structures, performance implications, observability, etc. As with the coding exercises, nothing obscure and no gotchas in the task, or our discussion. Just practical, real-world engineering considerations. You are not expected to be an expert in all things.

Co-CEO 1:1 on experiences, interests and values (45min)

A conversation to help us understand what it’s like to work with you as a person. We’ll discuss topics like how you’ve handled different types of situations in the past, what kinds of projects you’ve enjoyed (and not) and why, how you work best, ambitions, motivations, etc.

References & offer

Provided it sounds like a strong mutual fit and opportunity after the interview panel, we ask for 2-3 professional references—direct teammates or managers from prior roles/projects. These 10-15 minute conversations with your references are the final step enabling us to send you the formal offer to join our team!

Compensation and Benefits

The base salary range for this full-time position is between $130,000 and $160,000. The range displayed in this job posting reflects the minimum and maximum target for new hire salary for this position. Within the range, individual pay is determined by various factors, including job-related skills (as uncovered during the interview process), experience, and relevant education or training. Please note that the compensation details listed in this posting reflect the base salary only, and do not include equity, benefits, or potential performance-related bonuses.

• Competitive salary and benefits. Annual salary range for this role is between $130,000 and $160,000. Equity compensation is between .2% and .6% of shares outstanding.
• Comprehensive medical, dental, vision insurance and 401(k)
• Flexible PTO
• Relocation support to move to Austin
• Monthly wellness stipend

Detailed list of benefits can be found here.