Pomelo, Inc. Looking for Software Engineer at San Francisco, CA Full Time

?? Hello, we’re Pomelo

We’re an early-stage startup on a mission to reinvent money transfer . Think immigrants in the US who send money to their families back home.

Traditional money transfer companies charge hefty fees to send money. The World Bank reports that remitters lose 6% today to fees and exchange rate markups.

Pomelo fixes this by using the power of credit. Instead of sending cash overseas, consumers in the US can apply for our Pomelo Mastercard and give their loved ones overseas access to their credit — for free .

Instead of charging our customers, we make money from interchange, like most other credit cards. This puts money back in the hands of the people who need it most — our customers.

We have a host of other benefits, like making money transfer safer too (no more carrying or picking up cash), and helping immigrants build their credit when they don’t have great credit today. Read more about us here:

• Our website , particularly our FAQs
• Our launch blog post from our founder & CEO

As of August 2022, we’re a distributed/remote team of ~20, and we’re hiring across the US. We’ve raised $20M in venture capital to date (along with a $50M warehouse facility), and our investors include Keith Rabois (former COO of Square), Kevin Hartz (co-founder of Xoom), The Chainsmokers, and The Weeknd!

We’re hiring

We’re a small team of <10 engineers today, and we’re looking for 2-3 more engineers to join us on our journey. We’re still early-stage, so if working on a small team with lots of ownership , responsibility , and impact excites you, keep reading. =)

Our tech stack today is primarily:

• Java, Postgres, and AWS on the backend
• TypeScript, React, and React Native on the frontend

We care less about experience with these specific technologies and more about experience building , shipping , and iterating on production apps and services in general.

We’re similarly open to both engineers who specialize in backend or frontend and engineers who prefer to work full-stack; our goal is to build a diverse team with complementary skill sets .

The work

Regardless of specialization, you’ll be given major problems to solve, and significant ownership in solving them. Examples of problems you might get to work on include:

• ? Growth. Deeply understand our end-to-end acquisition funnel, work with our peers in product and marketing to identify opportunities for impact, and then make them happen! Success is measured directly through conversions and retention.

↪ Recent examples here include shipping a web version of our signup flow (originally mobile-only), iterating on our credit underwriting model (to expand access to our product), and building out a significant promotional exchange rates feature (making us significantly better than the market).

• ✨ Quality and delight. Our success as a company will be determined in large part by the quality of the product we provide to our customers and how delighted we make them feel. (Word of mouth is the number one way most money transfer services spread.) What feedback are we hearing from customers and customer service? Where are we falling short, and where can we go above and beyond?

↪ Recent examples here include integrating with a courier service in the Philippines for fast and reliable card delivery overseas, and implementing an international security standard (3DSecure) for immediate “virtual card” support (our first magic moment).

• ? Infra and tools. We take pride in our craft, and we value our time, so we regularly build infrastructure and tooling that makes us more effective or saves us time.

↪ Recent examples here include a whole internal admin app for customer support and operations (we use Retool for this today), analytics & experimentation infra to let us test, measure, and learn (we use Segment, Mixpanel, and LaunchDarkly today), and continuous deployment infra for our website (automatically shipping to production on every merge to main, with preview deployments on every PR).

We work in cross-functional “squads” and collaborate both within and outside of eng. We operate in sprints and try to ship and demo something meaningful every week. And besides daily standups and weekly all-hands, we try to leave most time unscheduled, so the focus can be on the work and the problems above.

The requirements

We know that women and minorities read lists of requirements and consider themselves unqualified if they don’t meet every single one.

So rather than list every possible thing we might want to see, below are the things that are most important to us:

• Genuine interest in our mission , and genuine desire to have real-world impact . We’re too small and early today to support engineers who are only interested in deep technical problems, for example.
• Ability and readiness to work in an early-stage startup. You have experience working in ambiguous environments, defining or clarifying requirements yourself. You’ve taken initiative and ownership in solving problems , not just implementing solutions.
• Solid technical proficiency in your area of expertise. You’re capable of independently building meaningful apps or services, and have experience shipping and iterating on them in production .
• Effective communication and collaboration skills. You’re able to clearly convey technical concepts and tradeoffs to non-technical audiences, and you have past experience working with others outside of engineering.

All of the above is more important to us than specific years of experience, but we expect most engineers to need at least a few years in the industry to gain this experience.

We’re open to both mid-level engineers (e.g. 2-4 years of experience) and more senior engineers (e.g. 5+ years of experience) today. We hope to support engineers earlier in their career in the future as we grow.

Our culture and values

We’re a fintech startup, and we’re a remote-first company. These things have shaped our culture and values. Below are our values:

• Earn the trust of our customers. As a startup, our customers come first, and as a fintech startup, their trust in us is paramount. We don’t take the opportunity to serve them for granted.
• Be relentless. Startups are hard and filled with adversity. We persevere through challenges, focus on impact , and strive to always be shipping , learning , and improving .
• Integrity in every language. We strive to always do what’s right, both for ourselves and for our customers around the globe.
• Show your work. Successful teams run on trust, and proactive transparency builds trust. We love holding ourselves accountable by openly sharing our progress, and we love empowering engineers by openly sharing business context. We also document extensively, to help us work remotely more effectively.
• Leadership at every level. We want every engineer to own whole problems and feel empowered to go wherever those problems take them. We also aim to lift others up and make others better.

Benefits and perks

Here are the biggest things we believe we have to offer:

❤️ A truly meaningful mission and an opportunity for direct social impact . We’re aiming to put real money back in the hands of the people who need it most and help immigrants and their families realize the American dream.

? An amazing team and culture (see our values above). You’ll have peers from both top tech companies (e.g. Google, Twitter, Microsoft) and other successful startups (e.g. Affirm, Remitly, MemSQL). We’ll both empower you and challenge you to do great work, in a great environment, alongside great people.

?? Opportunity for direct experience , learning, and growth. You won’t be a cog in a wheel here; you’ll be given major problems to solve and the ownership to solve them. Whether you hope to start your own startup someday or become a more capable engineer, the experience you gain here will help you achieve your career goals faster.

We hope you join us for those reasons and not for money, prestige, or the allure of working at a startup. Startups are hard, and success for an early-stage startup like us may still be years away.

Fortunately, we also value enjoying the journey, so we also happily offer:

? Competitive salary . You won’t be sacrificing significant cash to take a bet on us. We also calibrate our salaries to the market to prevent wage gaps for women and minorities.

? Significant equity . Successful companies in our space are valued at billions of dollars, so our upside potential is high. If you’re excited to bet on us, we’re excited to share in the rewards if we succeed.

? Platinum-level health insurance (medical, dental, vision) — with 99% covered by the company for you and 50% for dependents.

? Real, guaranteed PTO (we don’t say “unlimited” PTO then make you feel bad for taking any): 3 weeks in your first year, 4 weeks thereafter. We even go a step further and offer a…

✈️ $1,500 annual travel stipend — to encourage you to take time off and truly disconnect and recharge. You have no excuse not to now. =)

? $300 annual wellness stipend , to help you stay physically, emotionally, and mentally healthy, any way you choose.

? $500 home office setup stipend , to help you do great work. This is in addition to us already providing things like a top-of-the-line laptop and monitor on us.

? Twice-a-year company retreats , with potentially more frequent engineering team meetups, covered by the company. We’ve found this to be a great way to spend in-person time together while still getting the benefits of working remotely otherwise.

Next steps

If all of the above sounds exciting to you, we encourage you to apply! You have nothing to lose, and we’ll get back to you quickly.

If we move forward, our typical interview process is as follows:

• 30-minute recruiter call. We’ll get to know each other at a high level, cover logistics and expectations, and answer any general questions you may have!
• 30-minute manager call. We’ll dig more into your technical background and values, and answer any engineering-related questions you may have.
• 1-hour collaborative coding exercise. This’ll be with a Pomelo engineer over screenshare. This’ll be a data structures problem, but we don’t do fancy or tricky algorithms; this problem tries to be real-world.
• 3-4 hour virtual onsite! You’ll get to meet more of our team, and a typical interview loop covers system design/architecture, cross-functional collaboration, and values alignment — no whiteboard coding.

We look forward to hearing from you!