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About Us and Why We’re Hiring
We build “You Need a Budget,” the best budgeting software and educational resources around. (Those in the know call us YNAB, which is pronounced “why-nab.”) For more than a decade, people have been buying YNAB and then telling their friends what a difference it has made in their lives. Google us, or read some of our reviews on the app store, and you’ll see what we mean. We love building something that has a huge positive impact on people’s lives.
For this position, YNAB is looking for a software engineer willing to use their development skills to further our quality endeavors. Beyond writing great automated tests, we are interested in someone capable of helping us create and transform our quality-related infrastructure. Direct QA experience is a plus but not a requirement.
We have big plans for our entire app ecosystem, including our web app, API, and Android and iOS mobile clients. Our back-end runs on Rails/Postgres, our web front-end is an Ember app written in TypeScript, we have a TypeScript cross-platform shared library for common business logic, and our Android and iOS clients are native.
All of our full-stack developers are responsible for writing tests and producing high quality solutions. We also have a growing QA team of analysts and testers, and we make extensive use of third-party testing tools and services.
We’re looking for a full-stack software engineer to use their expertise to sprinkle technical magic into all our quality assurance efforts across the organization—to make everyone more efficient in our team approach to continually delivering quality with confidence. That’s where you come in!
We have one overarching requirement when it comes to joining our team: our Core Values Manifesto has to really click with you. If you’re nodding emphatically while reading this, you’ll probably like it here, and we can’t wait to connect with you!
Of course, we have some firm* requirements too, like five years of professional engineering experience in product development or QA. For us, this means you know how to code, have server-side and client-side development knowledge, and have an interest in high leverage internal tooling, improving test infrastructure, and enabling efficient QA automation.
*Well, firm-ish. If you know you’re a great fit for this role but fall a little short of the five-year requirement, we encourage you to go ahead and apply. We don’t need you to be the perfect candidate on paper.
On a similar note, we know imposter syndrome can be a powerful force, and may discourage fantastic people from applying. Please apply anyway. Many of us here have it too, so you’re in good company.
Okay, let’s talk about life at YNAB, and then we’ll go into detail about what we’re looking for.
Who You’d Be Working With
Our engineering team is about 35 strong, including three people dedicated to QA. In this role, you’ll get to work with awesome people from all different parts of the development organization.
Regardless of their varied interests, all of our developers and QA analysts have one thing in common: They are a joy to work with. You won’t find heated arguments and raised voices here. We save our competitive spirit for YNAB’s external competitors (or the occasional lively board game session), but internally we build up our teammates and celebrate their successes. We all love to solve problems in creative ways, and we regularly take time to geek out and show each other something cool we built or found to make our lives easier.
How You’ll Work at YNAB
We also work really hard, together, to make working at YNAB an amazing experience, and we were (humbly) proud to be named Fortune’s #1 Best Small Company to Work For the last two years. We have a team of truly exceptional people—the kind you’ll be excited to work with. Here’s how we operate:
Responsibility and Empowerment
YNAB appreciates, respects, and trusts the expertise and judgment of our developers. We empower them to do what they think is right.
We also work collaboratively. We continuously seek the right amount of structure and unity necessary to maximize productivity. Where it makes sense, we designate someone to make a call.
Even though our people are right a lot, it’s okay to make mistakes here. Exploration and calculated risks are vital to velocity and growth. We freely admit when we’re wrong. If something doesn’t go as expected, we learn, bounce back, and make corrections.
You won’t be alone; others will be there to help, review, reassure, and back you up. We own our processes and collective outcomes as a team.
Live (Almost) Anywhere You Want
We’ve always been a fully remote team, and have people all over the world. For this role, you’ll need to be located somewhere between the Pacific Time Zone (UTC-8) and the Central European Time Zone (UTC+1). Wherever you are, just make sure you have a reliable internet connection.
No Outrageous Hours
We want everyone to have a full life outside of YNAB, and we seldom work more than 40 hours per week. There have been a few occasions where things got busy and people had to put some extra time in. But then they took some extra time off, so it all balances out. We work hard and smart, but we’re in this for the long haul.
Take Vacation (Seriously)
We want you to take vacation. In fact, we have a minimum vacation policy of three weeks per year. Five weeks feels about right (plus two extra weeks for our company-wide December break). It’s important to get plenty of downtime and get out and do something. We’ll look forward to seeing pictures of your adventures in our #office_wall Slack channel.
The YNAB Retreat
When the pandemic isn’t keeping us from traveling, we get the whole team together once a year to catch up on spreadsheets and powerpoints in a Best Western conference room. Just kidding. So far, we’ve done Costa Rica, a gigantic cabin in the mountains, a beach house in the Outer Banks, a ranch in Montana, and most recently, Laguna Beach. We do really fun things at these retreats, but the highlight is inevitably just being together and having a blast.
Up Your Game
We’re serious about helping you improve your craft. We budget for it (hey-o!). Think conferences, Lynda/Skillshare subscriptions, books, and dedicated time away from work to learn something new. We love to see our people grow.
International is Absolutely Okay
Our team is spread across the globe, including Switzerland, Mexico, Canada, Brazil, the United Kingdom, and all over the United States. We set up team members in the US and UK as employees, and those in other countries as independent contractors.
As mentioned above, we have some time zone restrictions for this role, but as long as you’re between UTC-8 and UTC+1, we’re good!
Benefits
We offer excellent health, dental, and vision insurance for our US employees, where we cover 100% of the premium for you and your family. No need to check your vision, you read that right—100%. Although if you did need to check your vision, we’ve got you covered!
We also have a Traditional and Roth 401k option. YNAB matches your contributions, up to six percent of your paycheck. Matches vest immediately. (Are you a personal finance junkie like our founder Jesse? He set up YNAB’s 401k to have the lowest fee structure possible, where all plan costs are paid by YNAB, not your retirement nest egg. The investment funds available are fantastic, passively-managed, ultra low-cost index funds. Not a PF junkie? Trust us, it’s awesome.)
For UK employees, we also contribute six percent to your pension.
Competitive Compensation
The starting salary range for this position is $124,000-$162,000 USD annually, depending on experience. We consider raises every year, and have a bi-annual profit-share bonus. YNAB wins, you win—that kind of thing.
Other Tidbits
- Once you start, we DEMAND (in a friendly, ALL CAPS IS YELLING way) that you fill out your “Bucket List” spreadsheet with 50 items. (That’s harder than it sounds!)
- The bucket list really helps in deciding what we should give you for your birthday and the holidays.
- We’re all adults. There’s no need to punch a clock or ask for permission to take off early one afternoon to go see the doctor. We look at what you accomplish, not how long you sit (have you tried standing?) in front of a computer.
- We want you firing on all cylinders so we’ll set you up with a top-of-the-line computer and will replace it regularly.
- Did we mention we make a huge, positive difference in people’s lives?
If this sounds like your ideal environment, read on because now we want to talk about you. You will play a big part in building something easy and joyful to use that helps millions of people discover budgeting as an essential financial and life-planning tool. You will change lives.
You, Our New Full-Stack Developer Focused on QA
You’re a full-stack developer with at least five years of experience building, shipping, maintaining, and testing SaaS apps (not just websites).
You’re familiar with at least one modern server-side framework (Rails, ASP.NET, Node, Django, etc).
You have at least some client-side experience, meaning you know enough HTML/CSS/some-client-side-framework to get stuff on the screen matching a designer’s spec.
You’re the sort of developer who obsesses about quality and enjoys using your development expertise to build the kind of efficient automation infrastructure that gives the entire team leverage to deliver every release with high confidence.
You’re not necessarily the “Ops” person where you work, but you certainly understand the infrastructure well enough to aid in creating and maintaining scalable solutions. We host on Heroku, so experience there is a bonus, but experience with AWS or other popular IaaS/PaaS is just fine.
Working side by side with both our QA team and other developers, you’ll do things like:
- Add internal features and APIs that make testing various aspects of our products easier and faster.
- Use third-party APIs to develop integrations with external test tools.
- Enhance the performance of the server, shared library, and web client automated test suites.
- Develop methods to efficiently set up complex product states required to test common scenarios.
- Devise technical solutions to reduce redundancy in the steps performed by external testing services to save costs and improve turnaround time.
- Identify and help eliminate gaps and redundancies across our tests and general quality processes.
- Review both feature and test code in pull requests.
- Create a framework for consistently measuring system performance.
- Evaluate new test automation frameworks and tools.
- Find ways to improve the efficiency of all our developers as they create and maintain their test code.
- Be a technical mentor for our QA team and evangelist of best quality practices for the development team.
- Acquire knowledge of our product across the entire tech stack and suggest changes we haven’t thought of to improve efficiency and quality.
- Earn immense gratitude from the QA team and fellow developers for improving their work lives.
- Gain the deep satisfaction that comes from employing all your development skills in a high leverage way to ensure YNAB delights its customers with every release.
You’re our person if:
- You are an excellent developer that can adapt to new languages and environments quickly.
- You write code that is easy for other programmers and your future self to understand and use.
- You are comfortable with JavaScript and have developed or tested a user facing front-end with a web framework such as Ember, Vue, React, or Angular.
- You know your way around SQL and relational databases. If the database layer turns out to be the culprit behind an issue, it’s not a black box to you.
- You have an understanding of algorithms and data structures beyond arrays and “for loops.” That doesn’t mean you have to be a computer science PhD or even that you have to know “Big O” notation, but you should know when to use a Dictionary/Map, and why finding an element in a sorted array is faster than finding an element in an unsorted array.
- While perhaps not a security specialist, you are aware of how websites and services can be exploited, are security conscious while you code and review code, and protective of customer data and privacy.
- You have excellent debugging skills. You know how to find problems and how to architect solutions so that problems are discoverable in the first place.
- You have a quality focus and are great at crafting efficient automated integration, API, and UI tests.
- You adore using your engineering skills to help teammates.
Diversity
YNAB is an equal opportunity employer. We believe a diversity of backgrounds, beliefs, abilities, and experiences is critical to our success. We are passionate about creating a welcoming, supportive, and collaborative environment for all employees. All are encouraged to apply as we continue to grow a smart, experienced, and diverse team that loves working together to build something that matters.
How to Apply
- Apply by filling out this form. You’ll need to log in to your Google account to access it.
- The deadline is 11:59pm PT on March 31, 2022.
- If you’d like to disclose the need for an accommodation in connection with the recruitment and hiring process, email us at accommodations@youneedabudget.com. Be sure to indicate in the subject line that you’re applying for the Senior Full-Stack QA Developer position. (Please note that we can only respond to messages related to accommodations.)
We’re excited to hear from you!
P.S. If you’re not interested in this position right now, but know someone who might be, we’d appreciate you passing this along!
