Our Company
String and Key is a research and development studio building digital platforms that will change the way people manage and protect their money. Our purpose is to empower every person to live life to the fullest, with the confidence of financial protection.
We are a team of math nerd strategists, user flow obsessed designers, result-driven developers, and epic storytelling marketers. We’re an entrepreneurial team that values doers, people who think outside the box, and those who are not afraid to experiment. We love what we do and take work-life balance and professional development as seriously as our products.
The Role
String and Key is looking for a skilled Team Lead to join our Platform Engineering function. As a Team Lead, you will be responsible for managing the day to day work of a small team of Backend Developers. You will help define goals and tasks for your team that support the company’s product roadmap, work with other engineering leaders to clear technical obstacles and advocate for our internal technical roadmap, and use your own technical expertise to write and review code and help make architectural decisions for the company’s software products.
Engineering at String and Key
Our engineering organization is small but mighty and growing all the time. We’re a handful of high-trust teams where everyone is encouraged to speak up about things we should improve, leave code and documentation better than we found it, and to build and ship with both empathy and expertise.
Our engineers and engineering leaders are distributed across our offices in Brooklyn, NY and Durham, NC, as well as the rest of the United States and the world. This specific role is a hybrid role in our Brooklyn, NY headquarters. Why? We use Brooklyn as a talent development hub, and our interns and junior engineers work here. This role very specifically involves management and close mentorship of our team members who are newest to the industry, and we believe these people get up to speed most quickly in an environment with ad-hoc conversation, exposure to other departments, and very low-friction communication with their peers.
Our Tech Stack
Our backend team works on a Ruby on Rails monolith which holds all of our core business processes and serves a GraphQL API to our client applications (an iOS app in Swift with SwiftUI, Android app in Kotlin, and our React-based web client - each maintained by their own respective teams).
We rely on Postgres, Redis, Docker, and Kubernetes to hold our data and deploy our services, and use CircleCI, RSpec, various security analysis tools, and Simplecov to keep us accountable for quality.
Though all of our serverside tooling is currently written in Ruby, we also love Go and Elixir and are keeping them in our back pocket for when the right moments arise.
About you
You have a proven track record as a software developer with 5+ years of backend experience in organizations with a strong engineering culture. You’re ready to use your substantial experience with Ruby on Rails along with your understanding of relational databases and software architecture to develop and build secure, thoughtfully designed backend code for our core platform, API, and related tools. You might have already managed developers, or you might be a senior-level developer who has experience with mentorship and is looking to take the next step into a role with full time leadership responsibilities.
You’re excited about working closely with web, mobile, and infrastructure teams in a truly cross-functional department, love the value provided by a good test suite, and enjoy getting your hands dirty with supporting and operating work we’ve already shipped as much as building new features.
Most importantly, you know that little design decisions can have a big impact, and use this knowledge and curiosity about the company around you to be smart (and help your colleagues be smart) about how what we’re doing now sets us up well for the future.
Diversity and Inclusion
String and Key is a proud equal opportunity employer that is committed to diversity and inclusion in and outside of the workplace. We strongly believe that everyone deserves a seat at the table and we support a culture where our people are empowered to be their authentic selves each and everyday.
We’re building a team that represents a variety of backgrounds, perspectives, and skills to reflect the world that we live in and the customers we serve. You are welcomed to apply for this role free of biases or discrimination regardless of your race, religion, color, sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, age, physical or mental disability, national origin, veteran status or any other basis covered by law.
What We Offer
A Great Team – We focus on hiring people from diverse backgrounds who are easy to get along with and fantastic teammates.
Flexible Work Schedule – Hybrid work schedule. We’re interested in what you contribute more so than when you do it.
Work Life Balance – Unlimited PTO, Paid Holidays, along with Paid Summer Fridays and Paid parental leave.
Competitive Compensation – Exact compensation range is determined based on your region, years of experience, and specific skill set using aggregate market data from PayScale.
Health & Wellness – We offer 100% Medical Care Coverage for you and generous contributions for family, Dental and Vision Coverage, Commuter and Parking Reimbursement, 401k with a 4% Match, Health and Wellness Reimbursement, Free talkspace membership, Voluntary Long-term and Short-term Disability, Life Insurance and FSA/HSA.
Career Development – String and Key believes in upskilling their teams so each employee is provided a $1,000 annual training allowance.
Friendly office environments – Two modern offices; one in Dumbo, Brooklyn and the other in Durham, NC, offering a variety of working spaces for individual or team collaboration with free meals and snacks.
Social events – Monthly culture events, celebrations, team outings and social hours.