Software Engineer (Full Stack)

Application Instructions

Hi! Yuxin and Noah here, we’re the co-founders of Replo. We don’t have recruiters, so please fill out this form to start https://app.dover.io/apply/1fd59372-2352-40bb-8973-491c6695b248/db05aea1-1e41-419c-973e-3d8e3d209c24/?rs=15190316 If we’re interested in moving forward, we’ll get back to you, generally within a week.

🌆 Location

Our ideal candidate is a scrappy, self-starter, who’s comfortable working independently or with a team, based out of our San Francisco office. For the right candidate, we’re also open to remote positions at Replo (+/- 3 hour timezone from the Bay Area).

Replo helps companies sell on the internet by helping marketing teams automate building and testing customer journeys using AI.

Today, our beachhead is in e-commerce. Thousands of ecommerce companies, from Hexclad to JIF Peanut Butter, use Replo to build everything from their latest product offers to Super Bowl giveaways.

About Us

Replo was founded in the summer of 2021 by Yuxin Zhu and Noah Gilmore. We launched in 2022 and grew to over 1000+ paying customers in just 6 months, with no sales team.

We’ve raised over $8.2M from Figma, YCombinator, General Catalyst, Infinity Ventures, MAGIC Fund, Base Case Capital, as well as the founders of NextJS/Vercel.

Traction

We are default alive, and continue to grow significantly every month.

Founding Team

Yuxin Zhu grew up in New York City and graduated from UC Berkeley (CS ‘15) and prior to Replo ran engineering, product, and design teams at Uber. In his spare time, he likes to listen to audiobooks, play board games, and snowboard in Hokkaido. You’ll find him at his favorite restaurant in Tokyo, Menya Itto.

Noah Gilmore grew up in Chicago and also went to Berkeley (EECS ‘15, same dorm as Yuxin!) and prior to Replo was Principal Engineer at Plangrid, a YC company which was acquired by Autodesk in 2019. In his spare time, he likes working on his blog and assortment of iOS apps (you can learn more at https://noahgilmore.com/!)

Why We Exist

The web continues to be the most profitable customer acquisition channel for companies selling services and goods online.

Over the last five years, total digital ad spending in the US has more than doubled to $270B, while customer acquisition costs (CAC) have increased over 60%. As competition increases, there are more software platforms and service providers offering analytics and insights than ever before.

However, going from this data to actually optimizing customer acquisition remains exceedingly difficult. Marketing teams have to look at numbers, draw the right conclusions, figure out what to test, how to test it, and often wait days or weeks on other stakeholders — including design, copywriters, developers, media buyers — before they can even launch new ideas.

This method is extremely costly and exceedingly slow, because human experience, energy, and time is required at every step on the treadmill of refining customer acquisition. We believe data and AI can not only turn the customer acquisition flywheel — it can do so 10x faster, and 100x more cost-effectively than current, human-only methods.

That’s what Replo exists to enable.

Benefits

We offer very competitive cash and equity compensation with healthcare/vision/dental and 401K. We will also provide a stipend for work-from-home gear if you need!

Your responsibilities

• Be a critical part of technical and product roadmap, we expect all of our engineers to be actively part of the product management process
• Build products across our stack (using React, Typescript, Node, and more) that enable our customers to build differentiated user experiences online
• Architect full-stack systems across our product area (e.g. creating an SSR publishing flow for Replo components, or integrating Replo components with different third-party systems) and lead the implementation of these projects with our engineering team
• Collaborate directly with our team and customers to ship stable, maintainable code while iterating as fast as possible
• Hopefully have a blast working with us 😇

Looking for someone who:

• Has professional experience building full-stack applications in Typescript and React
• Has professional experience building and deploying scalable systems in real life (not pet projects)
• Has a very product and customer focused mindset
• Has substantial experience in Typescript, Node
• Understands the value of writing clean, maintainable software, including documentation
• Is comfortable with ambiguity and defining software architecture patterns to solve customer pain points
• Is self-driven and can roll with the punches in a fast-paced environment where priorities and requirements may change frequently
• Can work fast and has a passion for iterating and getting a lot of code out the door quickly

Bonus points if you:

• Are an ex-founder OR worked at an early-stage startup previously (Series A or earlier)
• Have not wasted hours interview-prepping on Leetcode 😭
• Have experience with modern full-stack React frameworks like Next.js or Remix (the founder of NextJS/Vercel is one of our investors)
• An eye for visual design (or past experience in product design, Figma, etc)

Compensation

• Note on H1B Visas: At this time, Replo is unfortunately unable to support employees on H1B visas.
• We’re flexible on compensation for the right candidate, but we also believe in communicating this clearly up-front for potential applicants. We’re targeting — 120-200K base with an equity component.
• We offer competitive healthcare, dental, vision, 401K benefits as well 😄

Interview process

Our interview philosophy is maximizing transparency and minimizing time wasted. Interviewing at a startup is a two-way street and it’d be a waste of everyone’s time if you joined and you realized it was a totally different job than you signed up for. Here’s our interview process for software engineer roles

1. Introductory Call (15-30 minutes) This is a call with either Yuxin (Co-founder, CEO) or Noah (Co-founder, CTO). We don’t have recruiters, so you talk to the leadership team on your first call to make sure it’s a good fit. We’ll talk about your background and what you’re looking for, and also walk-through expected cash/equity compensation.
2. Technical Take-home (Role Dependent) For engineers we have a 1 hour take-home coding interview. For all interviews, you’re allowed to use any resource you will have on the job (e.g. ChatGPT, Google). You’ll be asked to build out some features as an exercise in a simple client/server/react application.
3. Technical Take-home review (1 hour) We’ll take the work from the take-home assignment and work on it together (pair-programming or walking through the code). This will usually be with Noah (Co-founder, CTO) or another engineer on the team.
4. “On-site” Interview
   1. System Design Interview (1 hour) You’ll work through a system design problem where we’ll talk through how to implement an application at a high level (some diagramming, but no coding required). This will be with one of the engineers from our team.
   2. Technical Background (1 hour) You’ll talk through a deep dive into a past project you worked on - how they worked from a technical perspective, implementation challenges, what your role was and how you worked with the team that built it, etc.
5. Culture Fit Interview (30 minutes) Generally with the co-founder you didn’t talk to.
6. Offer! 🎉

All these calls can be done over video call, and we can do them back-to-back or over the course of a few days. We actively encourage you to talk to other companies because it’s an important decision, but we can move as quickly as you need. After these interviews, if you’d like to chat with other people on the team, customers, or investors, we’d be delighted to make that introduction.