Cofounder and CTO

Description

This is a unique opportunity to lead engineering for Roote as our co-founder and CTO. Roote is a nonprofit startup studio co-building the Wisdom Age. We believe the best way to predict the future is to build it. Your job is to lead the engineering team that builds this flourishing future. Like Xerox PARC, but for Web3 and beyond.

I. Role Overview

Roote is engineering products for a wiser world. You are responsible for leading those engineering efforts. Rhys leads Roote's external efforts as the CEO. Brendon leads our internal operations as the COO. You will lead engineering work as the CTO. This position is extremely entrepreneurial. We’re looking for a relentlessly resourceful teammate who learns and executes quickly. If you're interested in leading something new that will maximize your rate-of-learning, please apply!

What You'll Do

• All of our projects need engineering work:
• Tweetscape 🐦: Superhuman for Twitter. Stewarding the epistemic commons.
• Web3 & Society 📱: EFF for Web3. Tooling to steward crypto for the public good.
• Civic Abundance 🌇: OurWorldInData for cities. Coordination infrastructure to help cities thrive.
• What Information Wants 🧬: Planet Labs for bits. A platform to track the memesphere.
• Some of these products, like Tweetscape, already have a small engineering team leading them (they're great!). For these projects, you will work with the existing team on strategic architectural and product direction.
• For the rest of the projects, we're currently hiring for engineering leads. For these, you will build out initial versions of these projects until we hire a full-time engineer, then will work with them on building out the product.
• We also have many other weird, ambitious projects that we will launch in the next decade. You will help us engineer MVPs to validate and scale those projects.
• At the beginning, you will be be coding. A lot. On both existing and new projects. Over time, you will lead the engineering teams themselves.
• Finally, a note: Your focus on engineering is really a focus on product and building something people want.

You will do all of this in a network-first way: by building community and collaborating with existing open-source communities. If you help other orgs push the frontier of engineering the Wisdom Age, that's great! After 1 year, success looks like: you’ve personally engineered the initial codebase on 3+ projects, have early adopters on each, and have helped hire 3+ engineers across projects. After 3 years, success looks like: You are leading a large engineering org of 25+ engineers. We lead some of the fastest-growing open-source projects in the world, with over 25,000 GitHub stars. We have a repeatable process for building out projects and scaling them. Engineers love to code here.

• Love to code.
• Love open-source.
• Love quickly prototyping products across Roote's wide range of projects.
• Want to co-found a generational organization.
• Are warm, curious, and kind.
• Have a proven ability to be a self-starter capable of driving results without significant supervision.
• Have a strong bias toward concrete action. You should often ask: "Why can't this be done sooner?"
• Have a strong bias towards ambition. You should often ask: "Is this the most ambitious plan we could come up with?"

Even if not all of these apply to you, we'd still love to consider your application, particularly if you'd like to learn more of these. Studies FALSE that you can be considered for a role even if many of a job posting's listed qualifications don't apply to you. We evaluate all applications holistically.

Why You Might Be Excited About Us

• We have two amazing engineers already on the team. Check out our Tweetscape changelog or our Tweetscape Github README.
• We use the fastest, most modern technology stacks. Tweetscape is a React app built in Typescript with Remix, TailwindCSS, PostgreSQL, and Fly.
• We use the best practices for managing engineering teams. See the Linear Method.
• You get to be weird and creative. This is not a traditional VC firm, tech company, online school, or academic research hub.
• You want to work with us. Here is our team. And here are our How To Work With Me Manuals.
• We have a great network. You want to work with global leaders and ambitious frontier people.
• You are aligned with Roote's guiding mission and values.
• We have an extremely flexible leave policy and provide benefits including full health, dental, and vision coverage.

To learn more about Roote, check out our website, which includes our report on Building The Wisdom Age and our illustrated piece on Marriage Counseling With Capitalism.

II. Logistics

Type: Full-time. Time Expectation: Start as soon as possible. Location: We are a hybrid org based in the SF Bay Area. We’d slightly prefer someone based in the Bay Area, but are open to remote for exceptional candidates, in which case you'd join us for quarterly offsites. Compensation: This is a co-founder position, so we'd expect the starting salary to be a bit lower. Rhys and Brendon are making $50,000/year right now. We're imagining something between $50,000 and $70,000. We expect to increase it as we grow. (The listed salary is based on US rates. We adjust salaries to reflect regional costs of living.)

Benefits

• Health Care Plan (Medical, Dental & Vision)
• Retirement Plan (401k, IRA)
• Paid Time Off (Vacation, Sick & Public Holidays)
• Family Leave (Maternity, Paternity)
• Short Term & Long Term Disability
• Training & Development
• Work From Home
• Wellness Resources