Senior Developer

Oyster is on a mission to create a more equal world by making it possible for companies everywhere to hire people anywhere. In 2021, we have grown rapidly, raising over $70 million in both Series A and Series B rounds and increasing our team size by nearly 10x. And we’re just getting started. As a fully distributed startup, we’ve built an incredibly strong leadership team and employee base across 47 countries (and counting!). We embrace asynchronous communication and collaborative work. We live on our platform, and we’re passionate about improving our product every day.

Hiring people internationally is complicated – engineering, legal, finance, operations, and HR processes all interact to make it happen. We’d like to find people who think this is as interesting a challenge as we do.

We’re an inclusive and diverse workplace, and welcome applicants from marginalized groups – the world over

Location: Anywhere within timezones GMT +/- 4h.

What you’ll be working on

You’ll be a senior developer on one of our product teams, working on:

• Hiring automation. Hiring a team member cross-border should be quick and frictionless, but there are too many barriers to that today.
• HR tools. Companies are more and more building global, distributed teams, and they’ll need the tools to enable them to work effectively.
• Integrations. We are integrating payments providers so that employees and contractors all over the world can be paid quickly and conveniently.
• The employee experience. We exist to help remote workers find great jobs.

Delivering projects to empower companies and remote workers

As a developer, you will own the delivery of user stories. You’ll create high quality user interfaces, polished interactions, clear and responsive user workflows. And you’ll collaborate on the design of APIs to support them.

You’ll apply high standards of code quality and development best practices, such as TDD or continuous integration, and secure code thinking. As a senior frontend developer, you’ll be key in deciding on the evolution of our frontend architecture and tooling.

You’ll be expected to understand the product goals and provide technical input to specification, participate in discussions on domain model design. You’ll coordinate with the Product Owner on acceptance criteria. And you’ll collaborate with lead developers on architecture and implementation planning.

A key part of the development team

Outside of project work, we also expect you to support developers by answering questions and offering support when needed or pairing on complex problems.

We’re a young team, you’ll help shape our team’s process and help us make technical decisions to make us effective and a great place to work as a developer.

And to advance technical excellence at Oyster by researching new tools and practices, taking initiative on technical improvements and refactorings, and moving best practice forward through pairing, discussions in the team.

Experience and skills

We’d like to see:

• at least 5 years experience as a software developer
• having been senior frontend developer for large, complex software projects

On the technical side, we’re looking for:

• expert use of Javascript, and one or more frontend frameworks such as React or Vue
• deep understanding of HTML and CSS, including layout techniques and creating responsive pages
• experience in architecting frontend applications, and appropriately using tools such as state frameworks
• an eye for detail in creating a delightful software experience on the frontend

Will this role be a good fit for you?

• You thrive working in a team and being supportive of others.
• You’re persistent and get things done.
• You’re a learner: committed to learning and helping the development team to progress.

What’s it like to work at Oyster ❤️

Check out our public notion and see for yourself: Welcome to Oyster!

Here are some pages you might be interested in:

Mission, Vision, Values at Oyster

Why Oyster is a Distributed Company

How We Work Together at Oyster

Working on the Oyster development team

Our challenge

Automating processes to hire and manage people across 100 countries is hard. Doing so while creating a delightful experience for our users, with robust and maintainable software, and a customizable and flexible platform, is very, very hard. This is the challenge you’ll be taking on if you come to work for Oyster.

Team info

Our team. We have a team of about 8 developers, 2 designers, 2 in product. We’re growing fast.

Our technology. Currently, a GraphQL API running in Ruby and Rails, with React and ApolloClient in JavaScript on the frontend. We are running on Heroku.

Hours. We have a daily Zoom standup at 12pm GMT. We need developers to normally have significant overlap (say, three to four hours) with the hours of 9am – 6pm GMT, but otherwise your working time is very flexible.

We use Kanban, and have a monthly cadence of product investigation, delivery, and time for technical sustainability. (We’re on Linear.app.) We have fortnightly retrospectives.

Team We have weekly dev team meetings to discuss plans for the platform, where everyone is encouraged to bring topics, and regular brown bag lunch sessions are encouraged for developers to make presentations.

Hackathons and hack days. We have monthly hack days for developers to work on things they are interested in, and quarterly multi-day Hackathons bringing in people from other parts of the business together with product and development.