Job description
Company description
Block Party is a seed-stage tech startup building powerful consumer tools for online safety and privacy. People described our flagship product for Twitter as “bloody marvellous”, “the only thing that makes [Twitter] bearable”, and “v good app 10⁄10 much recommend”. The new Block Party has earned rave reviews of “amazing”, “fucking magic”, and “an essential extension if you access any social media sites”.
We’re a team of Stanford, Harvard, Yale, and MIT alums led by founder and CEO Tracy Chou (early engineer at Pinterest, Quora, and Facebook; 2022 Time Woman of the Year; Forbes 30 under 30) and backed by world class investors like Precursor and Stellation. More about us on the company website.
Start date
Immediate
Location
US; this is a remote role on a distributed team (core working hours are midday Eastern Time)
What you’ll do
You’ll be part of a small but mighty engineering team and help bring our products to market. You’ll work closely with the (technical) CEO and teammates on engineering, design, growth and go-to-market to prioritize the product and tech roadmap; you’ll also be a critical part of the engineering team responsible for building and shipping. And as a senior engineer, you’ll shape the foundations of Block Party engineering, not just in terms of the technology but also the culture and processes.
What we’re looking for
- A full-stack builder or frontend / backend expert able to work full-stack
- 4+ years industry experience
- A product-first mindset and the ability to communicate clearly and work cross-functionally with design, growth, and go-to-market
- Good judgment, clear analytical thinking, and strategic intuition about product, technology, processes, and people
- A passion for the details and a high quality bar, as well as the awareness of when it is appropriate to maintain that bar versus ship quickly
- Self accountability and the ability to execute in a remote startup environment
- Curiosity, humility, a desire to learn and grow and to help others learn and grow
- Passion for building thoughtful, ethical technology
- Experience with the current tech stack
Nice-to-haves, but not required
- Experience at an early stage startup
- Experience as a tech lead or engineering manager
- Experience at a consumer social platform company or working with their APIs
- Experience with trust and safety / moderation / anti-abuse
Tech stack
Our browser extension product, Privacy Party, is built in React.js and SCSS, with core automations primarily in JavaScript. The application backend is handled by a Python Flask service with a GraphQL API and persistent data backed by a Postgres database via SQLAlchemy/Alembic. Our cloud infrastructure is hosted on Render and AWS.
The application is integrated with Sentry and Mixpanel for error logging and product metrics, respectively. We use Parcel for static assets builds, TypeScript for type annotations / safety, Jest for frontend unit tests, and Storybook as a UI harness for frontend development. Additional build verification with continuous integration on CircleCI helps us ensure that we deliver a consistent user experience.
Note: Although it is currently on hiatus due to Twitter API changes, we still have hopes of bringing back Block Party’s original anti-harassment product for Twitter someday. The web UI for that product is similarly built in React.js and SCSS, served by Python Flask through a GraphQL API and backed by PostgreSQL with SQLAlchemy/Alembic as the ORM. The bulk of the engineering work, though, is in systems to fetch and process large amounts of data from the Twitter API, the asynchronous task work implemented with Celery and backed by Redis and RabbitMQ. Everything is hosted on Render and AWS.
Diversity and inclusion
At Block Party, we believe in diversity and inclusion, and no applicant will face discrimination based on: race, ethnicity, national origin, religion, age, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, disability status, parental status, or veteran status.
Additional notes The employer will not sponsor applicants for work visas.
