Software Engineer

About us

Letterdrop is a YC-backed seed stage martech startup that is growing fast. We had our best revenue quarter yet recently and are lucky to work with customers like Ramp, Descript, Gorgias, Synack, Synthesia, Census, Scribe, and many more.

We’re a 10 person team founded by ex-Googlers distributed across San Francisco, Chicago, New York, and Bangalore.

Letterdrop helps B2B companies acquire more customer through organic channels. The goal is to create a semi-automated marketing platform that can learn what’s working working, prioritize the right marketing opportunities, lower the friction for marketing asset creation, and maximize distribution to potential customers who are in the market to buy.

About you

• You are a product-oriented engineer comfortable owning fullstack.
• You think carefully about user experience. You have an eye for design, care about latency, and don’t skip details. You want to build a product that is as intuitive as Linear or Notion.
• You have strong CS fundamentals. You understand basics of memory, parallelization, runtime from a practical standpoint. ie. you don’t do things like create arrays with 60,000 elements and running out of memory.
• You are reliable and disciplined. We don’t want to micromanage you. You understand that early stage startups are a lot of work and can manage your time well.
• You are independent and know how to find out answers. Most of what you need to know is online in documentation, StackOverflow, GitHub Issues, Open-source code, forums, and our codebase. You can read, understand, and navigate through all of this yourself without too much handholding.
• You take pride in writing clean and maintainable code. You work on a team. You read others code. They read yours. Make both of your lives easy by making code simple and easy to understand. Do you hate yourself? No? Good. Then write code that you would want to read.
• You move fast. We’re a startup. We ship features quickly. See our changelog. You’ll be working through multiple features and bugs every week.
• You are interested in building great product experiences. Our product is used by marketing teams at fast growing companies. If they run into bugs, poor UX, latency, or things flat our crash, that reflects poorly on us. You want people to use our product and go “Wow!”

Who is this for?

• You want to cut your teeth as an early engineer on a small but hardworking team.
• You want to take the lead on building and iterating on important features. Our team is 3 full-stack engineers + a machine learning engineer. We need more hands on deck to take charge on making our product usable, intuitive, and fast.
• You’re excited to experience a lot of growth. Our engineers say that they’ve shipped faster here than any other job before. They feel confident from all the programming they do across different surfaces. It’s a massive career accelerator.

Who is this not for?

• You can’t work hard right now. If you have other priorities outside of work, being an early engineer at a startup is probably not the right move. It’s not crazy. M-F, 9-7, but also not a relaxed big company where nothing matters.
• You need a traditional environment and structure. I was a Product Manager at Google and am a technical founder. I care about product and code quality and meet with the team daily to answer product questions. Beyond that, you can ask your peers, but there’s no manager who’s going to sit by you.
• You’re not excited about what we do. We are building B2B software to help companies automate marketing. Lots of UX work (which you’ll focus on), data scraping, AI and LLMs, tons of integrations, and some distributed systems.

What will you do?

• Architect and implement features for our platform with on frontend and backend. There is no part of the codebase you won't touch.
• Lead the charge and maintain the quality bar for great user experience - intuitive interfaces, low latency, scalable systems, proper code separation between frontend and backend.
• Collaborate with team on code reviews and best practices to grow a scaleable codebase.
• Work directly with CEO to roadmap new features.
• Our stack is React, Node JS, MongoDB, BigQuery, Pub/Sub, Flask, and others.

Requirements

• 1+ years of software engineering experience.
• You’ve worked on a product with great UX previously or have a portfolio of personal project with good UX.
• You have publicly viewable side projects on GitHub and can pick-up new technologies and frameworks quickly. Please share your GitHub.
• You are comfortable working on both backend and frontend development.
• Ability to act independently, work well with a team, and ship features quickly. A positive can-do attitude and confidence that you can solve any problem is needed at a startup where we're figuring things out as we go.
• Good English communication skills and ability to read documentation online to research how to solve problems yourself.
• Familiarity with React, JavaScript, Node, and MongoDB.

Why you should apply?

• Lots of ownership on a small team.
• Directly interact with CEO to develop new features.
• You are looking to learn rapidly. This isn't a big company job tweaking small pieces of a giant project without impact. You will be shipping new features every week.
• We stay on top of trends: We’re power users of frameworks like Next JS, GCP, Figma, Linear, and use the latest technologies to scale.
• We build for our customers: We keep a good pulse on how our marketers think about content creation and syndication. We are rapidly growing our customer base who help us define our product.
• We’re grounded: Too many startups raise lots of money and are building fluff. We’re pragmatic and seek to create value for our customers that they're willing to pay for. We're optimistic that we're building a platform that will be the de facto tool for thousands of B2B marketing teams in 2-3 years.

Interview Process

• 45 min live coding interview on Zoom building API and backend
• 15 min phone interview to test for mutual culture fit
• 2 hr take home project with focus on frontend
• Reference from previous manager

We try to keep it as short as possible to be respectful of your time.

How to Apply

Your application will be ignored if you don't send me answers to these questions. The volume of applications is insane, so if you answer these, you will stand out:

• LinkedIn: url here
• GitHub: url here
• Did you attend a tier 1 university for undergrad: Yes/No
• If No, link me to projects, work experience, or explain why you'll do well at this role: 1-2 sentence answer here
• Can you work in Bangalore: Yes/No