Why join koodos labs?

You should join koodos labs for the people and our mission.

We aspire to build the best team of the 2020s. Just like PayPal in the 90s, Google in the 00s, and Stripe in the 10s, we want to be known as "a place where it's good to be from." If you join us, we promise to be the best place to grow your career — with the best people you've ever worked with. We’re also working on a very bold mission.

We care deeply about helping people connect more deeply with themselves and others. And in the spirit of personal empowerment, we aim to invert the internet's data model over time and put individuals in control of their digital identities.

Read more about working at koodos labs here.

What we’re building

We’re building Shelf. It's a digital shelf that updates as you consume content online. You can control what shows up on your shelf, and see when people you know are watching, reading or listening to the same thing. And it's built on top of infrastructure that allows you to reclaim control over your consumption and interest data, and provision third-party access to it to personalize experiences without compromising your privacy.

The Opportunity

We’re looking for an experienced, thoughtful senior software engineer (full stack, with particular expertise in React) to help bring this vision to life.

In this role you will:

• Work directly with our CTO (ex-founder & led product & engineering teams at Improbable)

• Make key technical decisions across the stack

• Build features users will love

• Be responsible for crafting scalable front-end architecture

• Ensure code and product quality

• Implement engineering best practices across development and deployment

• Guide/mentor other engineers (note: this is an IC role; if you're looking for a pure Engineering Manager role, this isn't the best fit)

We’re early stage, so you'll have an outsized equity stake and an unparalleled opportunity to shape the product direction. Engineers at koodos labs decide what gets built and why, in addition to figuring out how.

We're NY-based (we have our own office in West Soho), with a strong in-person component, but also the flexibility of WFH days.

Our Team

Check out this Instagram highlight reel

We’re a small, but mighty team with backgrounds at YouTube, Coinbase, Harvard, and Cambridge, as startup founders and as early members at companies like Improbable and Lyft. We’ve come together around a shared vision and are dedicated to creating important and positive experiences for cyberspace.

We're well resourced (unannounced rounds) & backed by top-tier investors, including the backers of companies like Airbnb, Pinterest, Snap, and Twitter, as well as the founders of companies like Zynga, VSCO, and Scale and the people behind artists like Miley Cyrus, Justin Bieber, Lorde, Logic, and Panic! At The Disco, and many others. Our team is advised by the founders of Pinterest, Dubsmash (now Reddit), as well as pioneers of digital marketing and market design from Harvard.

We care about building a genuinely diverse team. We are a majority-first gen immigrant team and sponsor visas — we think that’s important as we build towards enabling easier digital migration. We share the same values of individuality, empathy, reliability, kindness and humility. One big overlap among our life experiences is contrasts: contrasts between our own upbringing and the world around us, contrasts between what was expected of us and what we ended up pursuing and our bringing together of contrasting, interdisciplinary worlds.

More about us here.

Ideal Candidate

💡 We recognize that the confidence gap and imposter syndrome might discourage amazing candidates from applying. Every job description is a wish list, so please reach out if this role really excites you.

You’re likely a good fit if you:

React: You should have significant professional experience working with React, and you should be familiar with features like hooks, prop types, and render efficiency. We’ll want to learn from your experiences, so you should have a perspective on what makes frontend code reliable and maintainable.

Five+ years experience: As a small startup, we’re prioritizing candidates with 5+ years in software engineering. Our stack is React and Postgres (via Supabase) — and for this role we’re especially interested in folks who are experts at React. We also rely on Next.js, tRPC, Capacitor, Typescript.

Team: You are an engineer who wants to ship code and contribute to a great engineering team. At koodos labs, we know that early teammates set the culture years into the future. You should be committed to the startup journey, have a perspective on what makes great code and what makes a great team — and you should care deeply about holding both code and teams to a high standard. We are an in-person team in New York and believe that being together IRL is an important part of setting the right pace, level of collaboration and culture early on.

Ownership: You have shipped software for at least five years, and you’re ready to take end-to-end responsibility for a codebase. You know what makes a frictionless user experience, and you’re excited to ship code to production.

Learning: You are comfortable building early-stage products and taking action with imperfect information. The market is changing rapidly, and we need to respond to change without running in circles. You should be comfortable adapting rapidly while remaining focused on a goal.

Individuality: You bring a unique perspective to the team. We want anyone in the world to be able to use our products, so we approach diversity and inclusion seriously and thoughtfully. We recognize that bringing together different perspectives and backgrounds helps build stronger teams and products.

Startup Experience: You know that building great companies takes a lot of work. Seed-stage companies can offer some of the most challenging, invigorating, and rewarding experiences in tech — quite simply, koodos labs is different from Big Tech. It helps if you’ve experienced the ups and downs of startup life before, but so long as you’re excited for an adventure, we’re excited to have you join.

Here are some quotes from team members around what they want to see:

• “Have strong product chops pls”

• “Bonus points if they are excited about video game mechanics, and the idea of creating digital toys.”

• “Are deeply committed to high-quality, sustainable, and scalable engineering”

• “Can elegantly structure and decomp complex features”

• “Are comfortable with ambiguity”

• “Generate quick yet thoughtful solutions when faced with constraints”

• “Put ego aside when making decisions”

• “Practice leading without authority”

What you'll do

Day 1: You’ll merge your first PR. We want our developer experience to be as smooth as possible, so this first day is a good test of how we’re doing on dev ops. The code changes will be very minor — just adding your name to a file and merging it to the main branch.

Day 7: You’ll ship your first feature to production. We believe in learning-by-doing, so we’ll assign you a small feature that lets you run through our full feature planning and development pipeline. We’ll make sure you have support at every step along the way.

Day 30: You’ll assume responsibility for an end-to-end feature and/or part of the codebase. We have an ownership culture, so as soon as you’re familiar with a part of the codebase, we’ll put you in charge of that specific part.

In the Future: You’ll become a senior leader at koodos labs, either as a people manager or an individual contributor. We expect the early team to grow into high-impact roles as the company scales.

How we interview

We lean heavily on prior experience, demonstrated ability, and references. We don’t want to have brilliant people inverting binary trees or solving riddles.

Interviews:

We start the process with a discussion to hear more about your prior experience and goals, and to tell you more about koodos labs. This’ll be casual!

If we both think there’s a potential fit, we’ll have a second interview with a deep-dive on your prior experiences.

At this point, we might ask a few follow-up questions over email, for example we might ask for you to share a project + repo that you've worked on that you're particularly proud of, and a short video taking us through the architecture, explaining any particularly interesting components -- 15-20 minutes should be enough.

Onsite:

You made it to the final stage! We have a 2-part onsite process (so that’s 2 visits to our office in West Soho).

The first part is a 1-hour on-site with members of our engineering team. It’ll be a collaborative debugging challenge 🪲

The second part on another date will be an opportunity for you to meet the rest of the team! It’ll be a series of discussions with team members and an opportunity to grab lunch with us. We think it’s important that you get a feel for what it’d be like to work with us! 🙂

References: After the interview stage, we ask for 2-3 references who would be willing to discuss their experiences working with you. We’ll make sure to be respectful of their time; most calls take about 15 minutes.

Decision: This part’s on us, and we promise to move fast.

How to apply

If interested, please drop us a line on joinus@koodos.com with your resume.

FAQs

• Where will I work?

  koodos labs is based out of New York City. We default to in-office and are typically in Monday, Tuesday and Friday with the option of WFH other days. Our office is based in West Soho at 515 Greenwich Street.

• What tech stack do you use?

  Our stack is React and Postgres (via Supabase).We also rely on Next.js, tRPC, Capacitor, Typescript.

• Are you hiring interns?

  We’re excited to hire early-career teammates as we scale, but right now we’re solving for fast, high-quality execution with high ownership, so we aren’t hiring interns in the near future.

• Are you open to part-time?

  All our roles are full-time. Things move very quickly in the early days of a startup, so it's important all team members are full-time and able to respond to issues as they arise.

• Where can I find more info?

  Reach out to joinus@koodos.com with any other questions.

• Do you sponsor visas?

  YES! We actually do. Our team is mostly made up of immigrants or first-gen Americans.