Kanda (YC W21) Is Hiring

Hi! We are Phil, Richard & Rob, founders of Kanda - we let Europe’s 200M homeowners pay monthly for their home improvements.

We were part of Y Combinator and recently raised our seed round from several US funds and incredible founders like James Park (Fitbit), Henry De Zoete (Look After My Bills), and Kenny Stone (PlanGrid).

We are looking to hire a Head/VP of Engineering to join our team! (Full job post https://www.notion.so/getkanda/Head-VP-of-Engineering-at-Kanda-7dcd1b8c099a432cb190aa39ebeba168#1790be1f792b40bfac740ff69c82a68d)

TL;DR

• build the future of finance in construction by creating a new way for homeowners to pay for renovations
• build a lending company from the ground up whilst learning about all aspects of building a fintech (debt management, raising, loan origination, credit brokering...)
• lead and grow an excellent development team by helping us decide on best practices and the future hiring strategy
• be programming 80%+ of your time whilst motivating, leading, and developing our engineering team with the rest
• have fun while doing what you love (which is of course programming and leading)
• you are: a current engineering leader, or a senior developer looking to take a step up, who is passionate about their work and want the impact and flexibility of working in a startup

Come build the future of home improvements with us!

At Kanda, we are building the future of finance for home improvements - by letting them pay monthly directly through their contractors. Think of us like Klarna or Affirm, but for the $1tn home improvement space.

If you’re a technical leader who is passionate about payments and/or construction as a whole, come change the oldest industry of them all with us - read on!

👉 We don’t believe where you live should determine your compensation and are paying US salary and equity rates.

Key responsibilities

---

• As a Head/VP of Engineering at Kanda, you will work with the founders to build and scale our engineering team by defining best practices, coding standards, and mentoring those you work with
• You will be in control of the tech stack, with a heavy focus on the backend architecture of the site. You will also work with the CTO to scope down workloads for the development team and produce a roadmap for the business
• You will work on core foundational services for Kanda. We have early product-market fit, now we need to build the technologies that will allow us to scale and serve hundreds of millions of users
• You will use, utilize and incorporate new and cutting edge technologies (such as React, Terraform, Falcon, GCP, etc.) and development principles to help Kanda revolutionize payments in an industry that is still being served with 1980’s technology. Over 80% of your time will be spent building, there is a lot to innovate and we need you to help us do it.
• You will help us decide what technologies we use to service our customers at scale, whilst not being afraid to challenge ideas and the status quo. You’re a leader who gets the most motivation from seeing your team work together and execute. As part of your role, you’ll bridge engineering and business so that we all move together as one.
• In summary, you will be a key member of Kanda who will have a direct and measurable impact on how payments are made in an old industry where over $1T of payments are made a year. Be ready to get your hands dirty and build the future of finance.

Current Tech Stack

---

• Microservice Architecture [Python; Falcon framework]:
  1. Falcon Containers running on Cloud Run
  2. Gitlab CI to do CI/CD pipeline together with GCP Cloud Build
  3. GCP Container Registry to store containers.
  4. Terraform for infrastructure provisioning
  5. Cloud Functions to run frequently calls
  6. GRPC and REST is used for interservice and external communication
  7. Graphql API interface to query and mutate data written using NodeJS and Apollo server
  8. Firestore is the main database
  9. Cloud Storage where file storage is needed.
  10. GCP is our public cloud provider
• Legacy Monolith:
  1. Django app running on app engine as a backend system
  2. PostgreSQL as a database on cloudSQL
  3. GraphQL is a gateway for querying data

💡 We are in the process of rebuilding most of this monolith architecture into microservices, as detailed below

• Frontend:
  1. React used for the vast majority of the site, with Tailwind used as a CSS framework
  2. NextJS used for landing page SSR to improve SEO
  3. SWR is used to handle interactions with back-end APIs

Who are we looking for

---

• You are a current engineering leader or a senior developer looking to take a step up; with years of experience designing, implementing, and distributing system architecture.
• You can inspire your team to go to bat for you, coaching less experienced members and growing your team. This includes being able to help them figure our tough problems but also encouraging them to find their own solutions when appropriate.
• You have experience scoping out work and organizing your team around a clear plan to execute on time
• You are curious how things work, enjoy looking under the hood, and are not afraid to challenge the existing solutions
• You have 7+ years of full-time software engineering experience
• You are passionate about the code you write - for you it is not just work, it is a craft
• You mentored engineers & peer-reviewed code
• You are proactive, self-starter and love taking initiative
• You look beyond the surface and dive into the WHY we are using technologies, always thinking about how it will benefit our users and our business most importantly.

from Hacker News https://ift.tt/3zZisPK