Fullstack / Rails Engineer (Sr / Lead)

We are looking for driven, curious, self-motivated engineers to join us and grow with us as the travel market and demand continues to ramp up. We are looking for people who are excited to take on a log of ownership of their code and the product as we keep building better tools to help pleople plan travel.

We have grown about 2x since pre-covid and have been profitable the last 2 quarters, and are looking to keep that momentum as we grow the engineering team further.

Our team currently consists of 3 engineers, 2 product managers, and a designer, and we have many opportunities to design new product features, improve code structure and best practices, strengthen development processes, and take on additional ownership and responsibilities.

You should expect to work on all layers of the system, from designing the DB structure, business logic, views, UI, interactions, analytics, AB Tests, internal dashboards & tools, and more. This is a great opportunity to learn more about each of these areas.

Our product/engineering team is based in the CA Bay area and we meet 2x a week in our office in San Francisco (the other 3 days WFH).

Read more about our current roadmap and goals

About kimkim
Kimkim helps travelers have unforgettable authentic travel experiences. We do this by connecting independent travelers with local specialists who design personalized itineraries including activities, accommodations, and transportation.

We partner with passionate travel specialists in 90+ destinations around the world who work with top local activity operators, guides, and accommodations. All trips are 100% climate neutral.

Read kimkim traveler reviews on TrustPilot

Travel is picking up again, with a solid summer travel and booking season where travel was possible, and with many countries recently annoucing their plans ot re-open borders to international travelers. We expect travel demand for 2022 to be quite strong, and are preparing to meet the momement by ramping up our product, engineering, and other teams as well.

We have a long, focused product roadmap to improve our travel planning tools for both our specialists and travelers.

About the Engineering &Product Team
Kimkim is a marketplace, and the product and engineering teams are building products to help our specialists, travelers, and our internal support team—in essence, 3 distinct products to drive the growth of the overall marketplace.

Read more abut how we build product at kimkim (by Yenyi Fu, head of product)

For example:

• For our specialists: we are building tools to quickly create beautiful itineraries and price them effectively. We build tools to help our specialists manage many concurrent ongoing traveler trips and tools to help prioritize their time for the most likely trips to book.
• For our travelers: we want to create a fun and engaging onboarding experience, where travelers can tell us what they are looking for on their trip. This also helps us match them to the best available specialist. We are also experimenting with ways to increase brand loyalty as well as creating “6-star experiences” during the trip.
• For our internal team: we want to build tools and metrics to help our team grow our specialist network in a “quality guaranteed” way. We identify best practices and try to train and encourage the rest of the partner network to adopt them. We want to be able to share metrics that help pinpoint specific areas for growth and improvement for each partner company.
  
• As an early member of our team, you will have the opportunity to shape these three distinct products.

We work in a flexible way distributed across multiple time zones, with most communication asynchronous. Daily communication is over Slack and Zoom, and we rely on shared Google Docs, Jira, Figma, and Loom videos to communicate asynchronously.

No specs are 100% final. We encourage and expect everyone on the team to share their perspectives and feel comfortable sharing different viewpoints to help us understand the tradeoffs between certain implementation decisions/designs from a technical perspective.

We break projects into smaller chunks, with each typically taking 0-3 days from start to launch. We have no scheduled releases and push code several times a week or day as projects are ready. We try to design and code for flexibility, as we typically make changes once we see things live and in use.

We are looking for people who communicate clearly, set good expectations, and deliver consistently.

Examples:

• Itinerary Page redesign (Figma design/spec)
• Loom Videos (Bug reports, feature announcements, spec walkthroughs)

About the Full-stack Position
This is a growth-focused role: We are looking for people who are looking to grow in their skills and responsibilities to become a leader on the team as we continue to hire more engineers. We are looking for people who are comfortable with changing product roadmaps as we want to stay flexible and adapt to new challenges and opportunities.

Tech Stack, Tools, Key Services
Heroku • Rails • Postgres • Bootstrap • Redis • AWS (RDS, S3, CloudFront)
SendGrid • Mapbox • Stripe • Twilio
Jira • Bitbucket • Figma • Rollbar • Looker • Google Analytics

Have other suggestions, improvements? Great, let us know!

Growth Goals & Expectations
As a small but lean startup, we have many opportunities to take on ownership and responsibility. As travel comes back we expect to grow quickly and sustainably.

Hiring Process & Expectations

• Interested? Email us at [email protected] with your resume and some information about why you think you are a great fit for kimkim and this role.
• Interviews will include technical discussions as well as meeting with others on the team, such as the Head of Product and CEO/Founder.
• Technical Interview
  • We want the process to reflect daily work as closely as we can.
  • We will share background info on a mock project before the interview so that you can familiarize yourself with the scope, requirements, and think about how you would approach the project.
  • During the interview, you should be able to react to new requirements that come in scope and be comfortable discussing different solutions and tradeoffs.
  • You'll be asked to write code in some form in a shared editor. But, we don't get caught up in semantics. It's great if you have Rails experience. If not, code in whatever language you think makes the most sense for your skills and the situation. Make up a language as long as it’s not too abstract. We are more interested in the process and your approach.
  • While we do not require previous experience in any particular language, strong candidates will have some experience in full-stack development (DB to UI), ideally on some web-based, consumer-facing product.

We are looking for people with a well-rounded skill set who are looking to learn and help us grow the team and the company.