Frontend Engineer [Internal]

The Role

We want engineers who can build a team and a company, not just a best-in-class product. We believe that certainly takes broad technical competence across our tech stack, but it also takes harder to find abilities, such as…

• Thinking forward from first principles and backwards from customer needs at the same time.

• Curiosity about both technical and business problems.

• Navigating competing priorities and tradeoffs using your own mental map of company goals.

• A desire for ownership in product & team decisions.

• Loving people and wanting to make your teammates around you better at their own strengths.

We think world class early-stage engineers often share some common background experience, such as:

• 4+ years of experience on strong software teams

• Experience with the highs and lows of building new products from scratch

• A track record of growth in team leadership

That said, we deeply appreciate and admire people who take initiative to pursue problems & opportunities they care about, so we are always excited to meet folks who reach out even if they don’t fit that exact profile.

Change the trajectory of small business

SMBs are the backbone of American society. Small business ownership is the best path to wealth creation and economic mobility for many Americans and we are widening that path by dramatically lower the activation energy in one of the major hurdles for aspiring small business owners: accounting and bookkeeping.

50% of US Small Businesses fail within the first 5 years and 82% of them cite cash flow management and visibility as the primary reason. Most SMBs report low confidence they know how to manage their accounting today and despite that, they're doing it themselves anyways because the only alternative is paying for expensive bookkeeping services which don't understand your business well anyways.

Two paradigm changes are here

1. AI is already dramatically expanding the productivity of data cleaning and data entry. The bookkeeping bottleneck is moving away from laborious human data entry towards data ingestion and user feedback.

2. There is a distribution channel to SMBs that doesn't require them taking a risk on a new product and convincing their accountant: SMB Vertical SaaS. These platforms have deep context on individual businesses and industries and are the core home for their SMBs' daily workflow.

Layer is building at the intersection, where there will a non-linear improvement in the end-user productand a differentiated distribution channel.

It's working. We are working with 15 different software platforms where more than 10,000 SMBs are doing their accounting with us and hundreds more are using our full-service bookkeeping to manage their daily finances.

Why join

1. World class team: When you meet the team, you'll see genuine interest in our customers and a vibrant commitment to their success as the path to our own success. That commitment is backed by exceptionally skills, agency, and work ethic.

2. World class investors:We've raised money fromBTV, the premier embedded fintech investor.

3. Real impact on real customers: We speak with small business owners every day, go out of our way to do what's best for them, and constantly plan around them. Our daily decisions and effort are quantifiably and emotionally impactful.

4. Build a company from the ground up: We want teammates who want to learn outside of their own specialty and contribute to building a whole company, including hiring, selling, customer communications, and much more. You will have at least as much responsibility than you ask for.

5. High-throughput, in-person collaboration: We circle up at whiteboards and tables many times a day to hash out decisions and plans as a team. We're moving too fast to rely on hierarchy and process.

6. Compensation: We pay competitive market salary and top of market equity. We believe that aligns all of us around team outcomes from day 1.

Our Stack

We don’t index on how familiar candidates are with our tech stack. That’s one of the benefits of hiring excellent engineers: we’re confident you’ll get up to speed and we’re confident the rest of the team can help you do it. That said, we want everyone to be excited about the environment and tool kit they’ll have on day one.

• API language:Kotlin

• Embedded components:React

• API framework:Ktor

• Database:Postgres (RDS)

• ORM:Exposed

• Testing:Kotest/JUnit

• CI/CD:Github Actions

• Deployment:Containerized ECS service behind API Gateway

• Monitoring/visibility/logging:Betterstack & Sentry

Our Team & Culture

What we value in people

• Curiosity. Everyone, even startup vets, will have to learn on the job 90% of what it'll take to be successful. On top of that, everyone at Layer needs to learn accounting too. Thriving in this environment usually means having a natural curiosity for both people and systems.

• Enjoying the startup journey. Startups are hard no matter what, but they’re only as enjoyable as you make it. We are having fun and we don’t believe we can succeed as a team without that sense of fun, so it’s important that the whole team loves what they do each day both when success feels easy and when it doesn’t.

• Caring about the product and the user. We love small businesses. We love small business owners. We believe they’re important as people, their business outcomes are important, and that our product is a big part of creating those outcomes.

Benefits

• Competitive seed-stage salary

• Top of market equity

• An employee friendly equity plan

• Health/dental/vision

• Lunch in-office