Claim Looking for Backend Engineer at Boston, MA Full Time

Why you should join Claim

You should join Claim for the people.

We aspire to build the best team of the 2020s. Just like PayPal in the 90s, Google in the 00s, and Stripe in the 10s, we want to be known as “a place where it’s good to be from.” If you join us, we promise to be the best place to grow your career — with the best people you’ve ever worked with.

There’s a reason this section is at the top: it’s the most important to us. If it’s the most important to you too, we hope you’ll keep reading.

What we’re building

Actual screenshots from production.

We believe trading will enable the next great social network.

Trading is a fundamental part of the human experience, and nearly everyone has found ways to trade with friends — whether its Pokemon cards, limited-edition sneakers, or magic swords in a video game.

We’ve built Claim to become a “Venmo for things” — a way to trade real-world items with friends, starting with rewards at brands like Sweetgreen, Glossier, and Nike.

With Claim, you earn rewards from brands you care about (and new ones we think you’ll like). You can also trade these rewards with friends, leveling up that free coffee to anything on the platform — from a free bowl at Sweetgreen to Taylor Swift tickets.

For brands, Claim is the best way to acquire a new customer. We’ve built a rewards experience that users love, and as a result, Claim can change consumer spending much more effectively than incumbents like Instagram, TikTok, or Google. We believe that in ten years most brands will use rewards instead of advertisements — and we’re building Claim to be the default platform.

Claim is currently invite-only, but if you’re interested in learning more, ask for a demo at [email protected].

Our team

We’re a close-knit team that’s ready to change consumer internet.

The best way to learn about us is by reading our culture doc here — we wrote this document together, and we’ve updated it as the company has grown.

Claim team at April onsite in Boston.

We’re fortunate to be backed by incredible investors:

Who you are

Team: You are an engineer who wants to ship code and contribute to a great engineering team. At Claim, we care deeply about building the best team of the 2020s, and we know that early teammates set the culture years into the future. You should have a perspective on what makes great code and what makes a great team — and you should care deeply about holding both code and teams to a high standard.

Ownership: You have shipped software for at least four years, and you’re ready to take end-to-end responsibility for a codebase. You know what makes a frictionless user experience, and you’re excited to ship code to production.

Learning: You are comfortable building early-stage products and taking action with imperfect information. Our industry is changing rapidly, and we need to respond to change without running in circles. You should be comfortable adapting rapidly while remaining focused on a goal.

Individuality: You bring a unique perspective to the team. We want anyone in the world to be able to use Claim, so we approach diversity and inclusion seriously and thoughtfully. We recognize that bringing together different perspectives and backgrounds helps build stronger teams and products.

What you specialize in

Requirements

Node: Our backend primarily uses Node, so you should be familiar with features like async/await, error handling, and API design. We’ll want to learn from your experiences, so you should have a perspective on what makes backend code reliable, fast, and maintainable.

GraphQL / Apollo: Our API endpoint uses GraphQL and Apollo Server, so you should be familiar with features like fragments, directives, and batched queries. We’re excited to hear your perspective on what makes a great developer experience with GraphQL.

TypeScript: Our backend uses TypeScript, and while you don’t need to be a language expert, you should be familiar with how to define types in TypeScript and how to debug compiler errors.

One more thing: We recognize that the confidence gap and imposter syndrome might discourage amazing candidates from applying. Every job description is a wish list, so please reach out if this role really excites you.

Nice to Haves

Startup Experience: Seed-stage companies can offer some of the most challenging, invigorating, and rewarding experiences in technology — quite simply, Claim is different from Big Tech. It helps if you’ve experienced the ups and downs of startup life before, but so long as you’re excited for an adventure, we’re excited to have you join.

Prisma: Our database schema and ORM use Primsa, which allows us to ensure type safety directly from our database schema all the way up to our GraphQL endpoint. If you’ve worked with the library before, we’re excited to hear about it.

FastAPI: For data-intensive tasks, our backend uses FastAPI and Python-based libraries like Pandas and Numpy. It helps if you can contribute with Python, but we’re also happy to get you up to speed on this environment.

What you’ll do

Day 1: You’ll merge your first PR. We want our developer experience to be as smooth as possible, so this first day is a good test of how we’re doing on dev ops. The code changes will be very minor — just adding your name to a file and merging it to the main branch.

Day 15: You’ll ship your first feature to production. We believe in learning-by-doing, so we’ll assign you a small feature that lets you run through our full feature planning and development pipeline. We’ll make sure you have support at every step along the way.

Day 30: You’ll assume responsibility for a part of the backend codebase. Claim has an ownership culture, so as soon as you’re familiar with a core service, we’ll put you in charge of that part of the codebase.

Day 90: You’ll help ship code across the backend, from services to CI/CD. As an early-stage startup, we have high-impact features all across our codebase, and you’ll be able to build solutions wherever the need arises.

In the Future: You’ll become a senior leader at Claim, either as a manager or an individual contributor. We expect the early team to grow into high-impact roles as the company scales.

How we interview

We lean heavily on prior experience, demonstrated ability, and references. We don’t want to have brilliant people inverting binary trees or solving riddles.

Interviews: We start the interview process with a discussion of your prior experience and goals for joining Claim. If we think there’s a potential fit, we’ll have a second interview with a deep dive on your prior experiences.

References: After the interview stage, we ask for three references who would be willing to discuss their experiences working with you. We’ll make sure to be respectful of their time; most calls take about 15 minutes.

Demo: We’ll give you access to Claim’s codebase and ask you to build a small feature (note: all candidates build the same feature). We see this final step as an opportunity for both sides to decide if we enjoy working together, and we’ll compensate you for your time.

Decision: This part’s on us, and we promise to move fast.

How to apply

Use the form at the bottom of this page, and we’ll reply if we think there’s a potential fit.

FAQs

Where will I work?

Claim is a distributed company with our center of gravity in Boston/NYC. Every two months, we fly the company into the same city for an in-person sprint.

What tech stack do you use?

Our mobile client uses React Native and our backend server uses Node (all TypeScript). For dataintensive tasks, we use FastAPI and Jupyter (all Python). You don’t need to know all these technologies to join the team, but it certainly helps if you’re familiar with them.

Are you hiring interns?

We’re excited to hire early-career teammates as we scale, but right now we’re solving for fast, high-quality execution with high ownership, so we aren’t hiring interns in the near future.

Are you hiring for non-engineer roles?

Not yet, but soon. Please check back in a few weeks or follow us on Twitter and LinkedIn.

Are you open to part-time?

All our roles are full-time. Things move very quickly in the early days of a startup, so it’s important all team members are full-time and able to respond to issues as they arise.

Where can I find more info?

Reach out to [email protected] with any other questions.