Full-Stack Engineer
When deploying applications in production, developers are forced to pick between two extremes: expensive yet simplistic platforms like Heroku, or complicated, do-it-all-yourself services like AWS. By contrast, Render makes it easy to get up and running quickly but also allows applications to scale and increase in complexity over time, preventing a transition to DIY infrastructure.
Our goal is to completely free up developers and teams from managing infrastructure. This will ultimately improve all software and enable entirely new kinds of applications.
We're building products that abstract over complexity and minimize cognitive overhead for our users. This requires careful thought, high creativity and a deep understanding of application requirements in production. Our stack is React, GraphQL, Go, Kubernetes and PostgreSQL, but we don't require prior experience with any of them. We're looking for engineers with high integrity, low ego, and an insatiable drive to learn.
Our platform serves over a billion requests every month, and we have tens of thousands of users including Stripe, NYU, and US presidential campaigns. We have product-market fit and rapidly increasing revenue, and we're backed by the same early stage investors behind Airbnb, Snap, and Stripe.
As a full-stack engineer at Render, you will take complete, end-to-end ownership of projects across the entire stack. You should already have experience building products across the stack and have a keen understanding of web frameworks, APIs, databases and multiple backend languages.
Engineering at Render
We're a small team of world-class full-stack engineers. We have complete, end-to-end ownership for every project we take on and expect the same from you. We review all major code changes through pull requests and are always pushing ourselves to do better. We iterate quickly and deploy to production several times a day.
Technical challenges
The biggest issues with platforms like Heroku are lack of flexibility, and cost. We are solving the cost problem by using containers and Kubernetes and intelligently scaling compute resources up and down. This will continue to be a major area of engineering investment for us going forward.
We solve lack of flexibility by using Kubernetes under the hood and abstracting all the associated complexity so our users get all the benefits (load balancing, service discovery, autoscaling, health checks, self-healing) without needing to manage Kubernetes or build everything on AWS.
The challenge is in building the right user-facing abstractions that make simple application deployments effortless and complex application deployments possible. User experience is our primary focus and drives everything we do.
Projects you might work on
- We run our Kubernetes clusters on Google Cloud Platform and AWS. You will enable Render's clusters to run on other clouds and eventually in our own data-centers. You will also allow our users to connect Render resources with their private networks in existing public cloud infrastructure.
- You will create an effortless serverless abstraction on Render and enable per-request billing for containerized resources.
- You will build a managed MySQL product for Render users.
- You will use machine learning to optimize container scheduling and save resources while keeping user workloads responsive.
- Render works great with GitHub and GitLab repos. You will add Bitbucket integration.
- You will build out Render's CLI and make the user dashboard even better.
- You will create open source projects and documentation in multiple languages and frameworks to demo Render's features.
You are a great fit for this role if
- You have a few years of professional experience shipping software. Bonus points if you’ve excelled at a small, high-growth startup.
- You have an intuitive understanding of web frameworks, APIs, and databases, and have worked with multiple programming languages.
- You are both curious by nature and an impressively quick learner.
- You are unfazed by unfamiliar codebases and enjoy figuring things out on your own.
- You can wear multiple hats and work across the stack, both collaboratively and independently.
The ideal candidate would check everything above, but you should certainly apply if you identify with most of it.
Why join us
- We're solving a problem faced by every developer and development team. It's a massive and rapidly growing market (AWS is privately valued at over $200B, and there are over 20 million professional developers globally).
- We serve over 1 billion requests every month, our users love us, and our revenue is growing quickly.
- Our stock grants are in the 99th percentile.
- Everyone wants to move their infrastructure to Kubernetes, but it's too complex for the average development team. Render makes it possible to get the power of Kubernetes without any of its complexity.
- The former CTOs of VMware and Dropbox are two of our biggest investors and cheerleaders.
- The company is led by Anurag Goel, who was employee #8 and Head of Risk at Stripe. He helped Stripe scale from 10 to over 400 people and is applying many of the same principles that helped Stripe succeed to Render.
Benefits we offer
- Competitive cash and equity compensation with early exercise options and extended exercise windows.
- 4 weeks of paid vacation, available from day one.
- 12 weeks of fully paid parental leave for all parents to bond with a newly born, adopted, or fostered child. We will also work with you to create a supportive plan of return.
- Long-term disability, life insurance, and 401K plans.
- 100% employer-paid medical coverage and 99% employer-paid dental and vision coverage for you and a dependent. FSAs available too.
- Monthly wellness stipend.
- Continuous learning benefits & related support.
How we're dealing with COVID
- We are working remotely until it is safe to use public transportation and gather in groups again.
- We encourage everyone to take a half day off from work every week, because we can all use some time off to manage the additional stress from the pandemic.
Working at Render
We value high integrity, low ego, an affinity for continuous learning, and the ability to figure things out quickly. We're always open to being wrong, and we love to improve our work through reasoned discussion and constant feedback. We trust and respect each other tremendously which makes doing all of this easy.
We'd love to hear from you!