Lead Front End Engineer

Foster is a social network for writers.

On Foster, writers submit ideas and drafts for edits from interested and qualified contributors. Our collaborative approach to writing transforms seedlings of ideas into timeless, polished pieces of writing.

Today, Foster serves a fast-growing, tight-knit community of online writers. Soon, we plan to serve millions of people who write on the Internet.

With that ambition comes a number of invigorating product and engineering challenges:

• How can we make collaborating on ideas fun and delightful?
• How do we define and connect the atomic units of writing?
• What’s the best way to visualize the evolution of an idea into a polished piece of writing?
• What interactions and incentives drive the most constructive engagement between users?
• How do we make the ideation and writing process fun?
• What are the lowest-friction ways to give high-impact feedback on writing?

At bottom, we’re building a platform to facilitate mass collaboration on ideas. We need a Lead Front End Engineer who can envision and deliver a nutritious, fun experience for our users.

More On Foster

Foster is a social network for writers. Our platform provides better collaboration and editing for online writers at a fraction of the cost of a professional editor.

We’re building a writer’s room for the Internet. Writers submit drafts for edits from interested and qualified contributors. Contributors gain public recognition and build rewarding relationships as writers acknowledge and incorporate their suggestions.

Writers love Foster. In our first year, our users collaborated on more than 1,000 pieces together and publicly thanked each other in published work more than 1,400 times. On average, writers in Foster rate the impact of the edits they receive as a 8/10.

We are funded by top writers and VCs. We just wrapped up Y Combinator and a Seed round led by Slow Ventures, with participation from 20+ top online writers. Our founders Dan and Stew have built multiple companies from seed stage all the way through ~$100M exits.

Our team has deep design and product expertise. Before we build something, we spend countless hours talking to users and iterating on designs. We believe simplicity is a consequence of deep contemplation and experimentation.

Your Qualifications

If the following describes you, please apply to this posting.

• You have a multi-year writing or editing practice and the written word plays a meaningful role in your life
• You’re comfortable with our stack: React / TypeScript / Node.js / PostgreSQL / AWS – and strongly prefer to spend your time working on the front end
• You have experience working on consumer-facing products - ideally, social products or text editors, or both
• You have a “show, don’t tell” mindset and default to action
• You have deep compassion for the end user and enjoy imagining ways to surprise and delight users. You consider talking to the users an important aspect of your job.
• You default to action and can autonomously figure out the solution to a problem

How We Run Hiring

1. Apply to the job here.
2. An intro call with the founders so we can learn about each other. We’re most interested in learning why you were motivated to apply.
3. A small task to complete similar to a problem you would encounter as a member of the team. The task will take ~4 hours and we’ll pay you for your time.
4. Another call to present your work. You can expect a few more technical questions so we get an understanding of how you think.

Your first 6 months with us

In your first 6 months, you will:

• Ship code your first day - find something in the UI that irritates you and ship an improvement
• Identify key technical risks and work with the founding team to refine the 12-month product roadmap to minimize unnecessary technical risk
• Audit the existing web app and identify key areas for improvement
• Create a 3, 6, and 12-month roadmap for key front end initiatives
• Lead the delivery of at least one new user-facing feature per month
• Establish engineering and delivery best practices for the front end team

If this sounds exciting, please reply to this posting.