Full Stack Engineer (Elixir & Liveview or React Native)

Sona

London

2 years ago

None

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Headquarters: London
URL: https://www.getsona.com/

80% of the global workforce is deskless, yet just 1% of all enterprise software funding is dedicated to serving these 2.7 billion people.

At Sona, our mission is to put cutting edge technology in the hands of every deskless employee to empower them to do their best work.

We’re a rapidly growing, VC-backed B2B SaaS startup founded in the summer of 2021. We are fully remote, with overlapping ‘office hours’ during the mornings (GMT).

We are strong believers in giving everyone the autonomy to do their best work, when and how they prefer. That means you’ll have a lot of flexibility and control over how to shape your job and work life, while getting all the support you need to succeed.

We take our health and mental health seriously, believing that we can only perform to our best when we are healthy and happy. That’s why we work 4.5 day weeks, with a flexible half day that you can use as you choose.

You can learn more about the team and what it’s like working at Sona here

About the role

We fundamentally believe that the best products are built when small, cross functional, autonomous teams are empowered to solve business problems as they see fit. You’ll be joining a pod which owns a particular area of the product and movement between product areas is encouraged and easy.

Engineers are heavily involved throughout the product development process, inputting into the why and what as well as the how.

Our stack has two main components:

A backend with a GraphQL API (for communicating with the Native App) and a web frontend built using Elixir and Phoenix Live View (the PETAL stack)
A native mobile application built in React Native + Typescript

We think in terms of “T Shaped” developers. This means that while all of us have some ability across the “full stack”, most of us have one side of the stack (e.g. Elixir or React Native) we’re stronger on and spend the bulk of our time on.

We’re passionate advocates of the Live View approach for building web applications and believe that it’s one of the biggest step changes in productivity and developer experience since Ruby on Rails.

Likewise we strongly believe in the benefits of the common, typesafe Android and iOS codebase that React Native combined with Typescript and GraphQL gives us.

Typically when somebody starts working with us, they have strong experience with one side of the stack and then learn the other part on the job.

How We Work

Our engineering principles give a flavour of how we like to work. We’re a fully remote team spread across 4 countries (and growing). We have a company stand up most mornings at 10:00 UK time. We aim to have fully paid for company meetups roughly once per quarter.

Everything starts with talking to customers. We like everyone in the company to regularly join either sales calls with new prospects or catch ups with existing customers

We’re a small company with a strong preference for lightweight, asynchronous processes.

Within product we work in sprints with periodic retrospectives.

Interview Process

Our hiring process follows this pattern:

Initial phone screen (30 minutes) focused primarily on approach to work, career goals and your questions about Sona
Technical Interview (1-2 hours) take us through a piece of code you're proud of and talk about how it's architected, what worked well and what you'd do differently if you wrote it again. If you don't have a suitable piece of code, we're also happy to pay you for half a days work to do a take home task. But we understand that everyone's busy so we'd much rather use some code you've already got where possible!
Founder Interview (1 hour), focused on why you’re interested in Sona and your questions about the vision

Requirements

We love engineers who have a non nonsense approach to “getting it shipped”, who when given the choice between “complicated and shiny” vs “get something simple in front of a user” will always choose the latter.

Everybody’s different, but a lot of the following probably applies to you:

You have extensive professional experience in either React Native or Elixir
If your experience is in React Native you’re happy to talk about Typescript, the role of generics and when they should be used, how hooks changed how we build React Native apps and when one should consider writing custom hooks. You’d be equally happy explaining promises and how they interact with async / await.
If your experience is in Elixir you’re passionate about LiveView and are comfortable talking about it’s advantages and challenges
You have a strong preference towards taking ownership, making sure you’re clear on what you’re doing and why and then communicating progress over awaiting instruction
You’re in a country which is GMT +/- 3 and fluent communicating both verbally and in writing in English

Benefits