Head of Engineering

About Scroobious

Hello there potential founding team member and Scroobious Head of Engineering! Before we get into the job, let me tell you about our company and its origin story. I’m Allison Byers, Founder & CEO. I founded Scroobious after raising nearly $10M for a previous medical device startup spun out of MIT (acquired). During that time, I experienced heavy gender bias in the fundraising process, but I was unaware of the extreme inequity in capital allocation. Only 1.9% of VC dollars go to women, and only 0.67% go to Black founders.

I founded Scroobious in January 2020 to build a scalable online marketplace that provides fundraising guidance and a community for founders to up-level their pitches while offering AI-powered personalized curation for investors. Click here for a quick platform demo.

We are post-revenue and have established dozens of strategic partnerships with accelerators, universities, and corporations over the past few years. Through these partnerships, we have helped over 600 diverse founders, resulting in many of them successfully gaining entry into accelerators, securing capital, and even experiencing exits. 

We have developed a strong brand voice and authentic connection with our community. I am an activist and thought leader serving as Co-Chair of the All Raise Boston steering committee. I helped write and served as an expert witness for California Senate Bill 54. I also have 10K+ social followers and have been quoted in popular press, including Bloomberg, TechCrunch, BBC, and more. Scroobious is here to make a widespread and sustained difference in the flow of capital to underrepresented founders.

The Role

As Head of Engineering, you are critical to Scroobious and our community. Our fantastic technical advisor, Dan Caddigan, served as lead architect and built our v1 custom web app, which we launched in April 2022. Since then we have run lean and capital efficient utilizing contract development to maintain and develop new features. You will be handed a clean base architecture and codebase, 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. We also have some elements that run on trpc/PostgreSQL.

  • 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.
  • Integrations: OpenAI, Customer.io, Stripe, PDFs, and other interesting services.

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 equity will be discussed based on the factors above. We offer unlimited paid time off, health insurance, stock options, flexible remote work, a sense of fulfillment, and lots of laughs.

Our Culture

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.

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.

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