Backend Engineer

About Switchboard

Through our own experiences leading Growth teams at B2B SaaS companies, as well as over one hundred conversations with folks currently working in growth, we understand how incredibly hard it is for teams to create personalized and contextual growth journeys that help users discover, understand, and realize the value of the products they're using.

The current set of products aimed at helping teams drive adoption focus on empowering non-technical stakeholders to self-serve. Generally, these tools make assumptions about a codebase without the owners of the codebase in the loop. As a result, they feel bolted on and are quite brittle.

The alternative that teams face is building everything in-house. Home-grown solutions are often not thought about holistically from the onset. Teams building them are often under-resourced and disincentivized to solve the problems they face in a robust way. The requirements for growth experiences evolve quickly, evolving from simple onboarding tours to personalized onboarding experiences based on user persona or past behavior. Functions across the entire organization (e.g. marketing, customer success, product, design, education, etc...) need (and almost always lack) visibility across the user journey to better manage who sees what when and avoid uncoordinated messaging spamming users.

We're taking a fundamentally different approach at Switchboard — arming the builders by providing developers rich tooling that helps them build flexible growth experiences faster and more robustly, abstracting away complexity around state, user behavior, and user identity while keeping them in control and fitting into their workflows and codebases. This is paired with an easy-to-use journey-building experience that gives non-technical stakeholders visibility, lets them participate in the creation of these experiences (in a safe way), and helps them achieve their goals.

About the team

Our founding team is collectively EPD (Engineering, Product, Design). We met as early hires at a startup (Trifacta) building a data preparation tool, working together for over four years to scale the company from 20 to over 200 employees. We've since fanned out, gaining experience across a number of relevant domains: product analytics (Amplitude), two-sided marketplaces (Patreon), and productivity software (Dropbox, Productboard). We are builders, we've built products and teams from the ground up.

Alon Bartur - former product leader at Productboard and Amplitude where he oversaw growth and core product teams. At Amplitude he led behavioral targeting and data management, owning product strategy for Amplitude's data and personalization products. Two-time Halloween costume competition runner up. Has one dog.

Phil Vander Broek - most recently led growth and business platform design at Dropbox where he built the core acquisition, activation, engagement, and expansion experiences and the internal tooling to support them. Likes to bake. Has two cats.

Joe McKenney - most recently he led the Platform teams at Patreon, where he led the development of internal systems and services (e.g. email, notifications, APIs) along with open-source developer tools like Stele and Studio. He can juggle 4 clubs or 5 balls. Has one dog and one cat.

Values

Focus: If our collective experience has taught us anything it's the importance of focus. At this stage of the company, we are prioritizing customer development, building our MVP, and company culture.

Customer-first: To date, we've had 100+ conversations with prospective customers as a means for grounding what we are building in real problems. We believe that losing sight of who we are building for is a fast path to failure.

Diversity: We've seen first-hand that the best teams are diverse. Building a team and culture that is inclusive and equitable for people of all backgrounds and experiences is tantamount to our success.

Employee-centric: All of us have been early-stage startup employees multiple times throughout our careers. It's led to tremendous opportunity and growth but has some hidden pitfalls. For example, the standard model for granting equity creates an enormous burden on employees - putting them in positions where they need to decide whether to spend vast sums of money exercising options (and paying taxes on unrealized gains) or, worse yet, stay at a company and environment that they're no longer growing or learning in to avoid losing out on the equity they've earned. The vast majority of companies give employees only 90 days to exercise options once they leave, counting on a large percentage to walk away from their options and then recycling them for future grants.

We plan to walk the walk when it comes to employee-centric decisions and our equity model is one example. We want all employees to be owners and to share in the future success of the company. We want the equity they earn for their contributions to be theirs, no matter what their financial circumstances. We offer both 10-year exercise windows to all employees and the option of early exercise. We think this is the most flexible and inclusive approach to equity.

What will set you up for success

• You have multiple years of experience working in statically typed and compiled languages
• You've contributed to the development of large web applications and some exposure to modern FE technologies e.g. Javascript/Typescript and React
• Experience working with tools like Kafka and/or data-streaming services
• You are passionate about developer experience and tooling
• You follow the insights as opposed to worshipping the rules (practicality > dogmatism)
• You can distill simple solutions from complex requirements (e.g. KISS design principle)
• You're excited to contribute across the stack, from work on our API/SDKs to developer docs and rich UIs
• You're motivated by having a hand in shaping the direction of the company, product, and culture

What you'll be doing in this role

• Developing our event ingestion and aggregation pipeline
• Contributing to our open source SDKs and API that makes it easy for developers to power Switchboard's core product
• Building our core product, the focal point of which is a collaborative journey building experience
• Connecting with the customer