Engineering Lead

About Scroobious

Hello there potential founding team member and Scroobious Engineering Lead! Before we get into the job, let me tell you about our company and its origin story. I’m Allison Byers, Founder & CEO. I spent about five years building and leading a medical device startup and raised nearly $10M going from a friends and family round through an A1 before it was acquired. During that time I was floored by how inefficient and stressful the process of fundraising was, and caught off guard by the gender bias I experienced despite a career full of being the only woman in the room. When I did some research and found out that women and minorities receive only 2% or less (yes, that’s real!) of VC funding, I felt compelled to help in some way.

I founded Scroobious in January 2020 to increase diversity in the startup ecosystem by teaching diverse founders how to create investable pitch material through a scalable online platform and making it easy for investors to discover them through data-driven curation. With our Pitch it Plan™ (PiP), entrepreneurs access online education, community, and personalized feedback from a human who understands the investor mindset to create compelling material in an approachable and affordable way. For investors, our platform clarifies overlooked opportunities by highlighting both the founder’s human qualities and the business information with personal recommendations based on proprietary variables and their own behavior so they can intentionally invest in diverse entrepreneurs.

We launched our PiP MVP in February 2021 and have worked with over 300 founders and dozens of diversity-focused accelerators and organizations to help diverse entrepreneurs raise millions and get into prestigious accelerators. We have raised a pre-seed round from angel investors and select institutions who are passionate about our mission and have an incredible hands-on advisory board. In a short period of time, our brand is already recognized as a mission-driven authentic voice with a truly valuable product.

The Role

As Engineering Lead, you are critical to Scroobious and our community. The PiP MVP was built on a low-code platform for rapid deployment and we have successfully demonstrated market validation. In these early days when we are running lean and capital efficient, our fantastic technical advisor, Dan Caddigan, served as lead architect and built our custom web app, which we launched in April 2022! This includes both PiP and an investor-facing discovery portal. We have a BIG vision for our platform that will utilize proprietary data and machine learning to give founders who identify as underrepresented a fair shot at capitalizing their companies and our economy access to $4T in lost value. We are building Scroobious to be a scalable, venture-backable company.

You will be handed an incredibly clean base architecture and codebase as a starting point, and then it is yours to own and pilot our decisions moving forward. There are many critical tech, data, and product decisions to be made in order to best serve our customers: diverse founders who are investable but need help communicating their story, and investors who struggle to find the founders they are intentionally looking to support with their capital. As a leader of the company, you will be involved in all facets including how to...

  • best guide founders through our education and review process.
  • provide feedback using explainable AI.
  • incorporate video capture and editing that is non-intimidating to users.
  • scale our data and architecture to meet the needs of external and internal stakeholders.
  • capture and leverage our data to bring diversity transparency to how startup sourcing is conducted.
  • use our platform engagement to build predictive models with an eye toward human behavior and preventing unintentional bias.
  • 872 other things not listed here.

We're in the pre-seed phase, so you’ll be coding most of the time at first, and as the team grows you will lead the charge on recruiting the core roles you see fit. This is an amazing opportunity to get in on the ground floor of a growing mission-based startup and work closely with business and technical wizards who are also good human beings.

The Stack

Here's our current stack so you know what you're starting with, but decisions will be yours on how to build our best product.

  • UI (web): The front end is a Next.js React app written in TypeScript. Most pages are server-side rendered, fetching data from a separate GraphQL API. We use Tailwind CSS for styling and use some components from Chakra UI.
  • API/Jobs: The back end is a Node.js GraphQL API also written in TypeScript (using Warthog). The same codebase runs both the GraphQL APIs and a BullMQ job server (separate deployments to keep the APIs fast).
  • Data: All data is stored in a Postgres database. The BullMQ batch server stores job data in Redis (which could eventually be used for caching, too).
  • Infrastructure: Currently, everything is hosted in Render.com for simplicity (uses infrastructure as code by default and sets up all Githooks/DEV workflows for you by default). The one exception is that we have an S3 bucket on AWS for file storage (as Render doesn’t have a solution that meets our needs). At some point it probably (maybe?) makes sense to move everything into AWS - this would be your call, though.

What You Bring

I’m not going to list a bunch of requirements, and while you don’t need to have mastery of the full stack listed above, you do need enough overlap that you can hit the ground running and get up to speed quickly. We're looking for someone who:

  • has read this entire job description.
  • is passionate about increasing diversity in the startup ecosystem and wants to make a real difference in the world.
  • has been in a leadership position wherever you are for at least a year.
  • enjoys working independently.
  • is excited to code.
  • is a stickler for documentation.
  • has seen some shit and enjoyed navigating through it.
  • is a person others turn to frequently.
  • likes sarcasm and laughs a lot.

How You’ll Be Paid

Compensation and/or equity will be discussed based on the factors above. We offer unlimited paid time off, health insurance, stock options, and flexible remote work.

Our Culture

We were recognized on Powderkeg’s list of Best Tech Companies To Work For in 2022!

We treat people like the trustworthy adults they are and operate based on transparency and respect. Work when and where you want as long as you get everything done. Have a question about the strategic direction or our runway? Just ask. Want to learn about a new area of business and upskill? Fantastic! Have a new idea you want to test? Go for it! Scroobians are part of a team that is stimulating, fun, and mission-driven.

I earned my MBA from Boston University, have 15+ years of tech operator experience, and am on the All Raise Boston leadership team. I'm a startup mentor and advisor, speaker, angel investor, and am frequently quoted in the press including Bloomberg, Business Insider, TechCrunch, BBC, and more (check out the news section). You and I will be working very closely together. I make it fun. Promise. 🙂

How to Apply

If you’re interested in joining our small yet mighty team as a core player with direct influence over the company’s direction, please click the button below to email your resume and a cover letter. Please, please don’t forget the cover letter including why you’re a good fit for the position, why we should be excited to have you join us, and how you learned about the role.

Your cart