Role: Full Stack Developer

Location: Remote (preference for Dublin, Ireland, or alternatively, timezones: GMT / CET / EST)

Role Status: Full Time

Remuneration: Competitive salary, based on experience

About ChangeX

ChangeX is a platform connecting communities to proven innovations and finance. Innovations like Grow it Yourself, Girls Who Code, Cycling Without Age, Men’s Sheds, Repair Café, Pocket Forests and parkrun are adopted and started by teachers, healthcare professionals, neighbourhood associations and other proactive citizens through the platform.

We’re on a mission to help build thriving communities everywhere by ensuring that proven innovations and finance are accessible to everyone. In our work to support thriving communities over the past 6 years, we’ve identified a number of challenges:

• People are craving more purpose and connection but only a small percentage are currently driving change in their community.
• There are thousands of proven solutions to social and environmental problems but these innovations are not accessible for wide replication, leading to wasteful reinvention or inaction.
• Funders, including corporates and foundations, are putting more finance into communities, but it typically does not flow to proven solutions and is inaccessible to the majority of people.  

We believe that technology presents a huge opportunity to address these challenges and to mobilise and empower millions of local leaders across the world on the issues that matter, from addressing climate change to improving education to building community cohesion. So far, over 16,000 new projects have started through ChangeX, scaling 80 innovations, and benefitting over 600,000 people. 

Our business model is called Impact as a Service – we make it easy for funders to invest in the innovations they want to spread in regions they care most about – partners include Microsoft, Target, Niantic, and Web Summit among others.  Our philanthropic backers include investors from Andreessen Horowitz, Union Square Ventures and Insight Ventures, as well as founders like Mike Lee (MyFitnessPal), Garry Moroney (Clavis Insight) and Jerry Greenfield (Ben & Jerry’s).

Our team is remote first, with an office in Dublin and soon in New York. We have team members working from home or from other remote hubs in Europe.

Our Team

We’re looking for a full stack developer to join a small talented product team (remote working options available). This team is working to simplify and accelerate the way people fund, start and grow projects in their communities. We’re looking for engineers who share our belief in the power of great technology to transform the lives of real offline communities. If you want to ensure your engineering skills have a positive impact in the world, we’d love to talk to you.

The Role

The role is an opportunity for a junior to mid-level developer to be part of the core team that scales ChangeX over the coming years. This growth in scale plus the team you join will provide an exciting environment in which to grow and learn while having the ability to make a significant impact.

Examples of Technical Challenges

• Development of new impact quantification, tracking & reporting system for the world’s first social impact trading marketplace
• Build new features that bring 100% financial transparency to how projects use funding
• Deploy models focused on optimized resource allocation, fraud detection and impact content curation
• Build new features that bring the impact of funded projects to life including BI dashboards, impact feeds and open impact APIs.

Requirements

Note that the expected required skills will take into account experience level. Specifically, for a junior starter, we are looking for talent! These requirements can be viewed as the skills you will have an opportunity to learn. Starter to 2+ years experience developing web applications.

• Previous experience with programming Ruby/Rails
• Fluency in HTML, CSS, Javascript, and Javascript frameworks such as React
• Experience working across the entire stack desirable (Ruby on Rails, Javascript, PostgreSQL).
• Strong UX and design sensibilities;
• Solid experience with AWS, Heroku or other cloud providers;
• Strong programming skills with a focus on clean design, well-refactored code and automated testing
• Confident playing a significant role in the vision & development direction of the product
• Demonstrated commitment to social change
• An entrepreneurial track record ideally, with strong empathy and ethical fibre

Technologies we Use:

• Ruby on Rails is our primary server framework;
• Deployed using Heroku for managing infrastructure;
• PostgreSQL Database;
• GitHub for source code management and process support;
• Travis for continuous integration.

Perks & Benefits

• Flexible working options: remote, in office or a hybrid of the two;
• 25 holiday days plus flexible hours;
• Annual performance related bonuses;
• Pension scheme after 12 months of employment;
• Basic health insurance plan;
• Master new skills from those around you with onsite/online talks and networking at our hubs;
• Access to a great work environment and facilities at Dogpatch Labs in Dublin, or a co-working space convenient for you. 

How we Work

Our development team currently works remotely as a team with members in Dublin, Barcelona and Mayo. Our wider organisation also has people based in the United States. Dublin is our headquarters and main office space – with core Operations, Sales, Support and Impact teams. Remote working has become part of our company DNA. We believe that it offers a lot of advantages to both ChangeX and employees.

We run a lightweight process that focuses on feature-based delivery on a weekly basis. Our coordination and communication are mostly through daily ‘catch-up meetings’ and use of appropriate tools such as Trello for backlog management, Slack for communication and Git(GitHub) for source control and feature deployment through PRs and Milestones.

From a coding perspective, we place a strong emphasis on clean, minimal, well-refactored code backed up by a robust suite of automated tests. We make use of peer review for all design and development work. In general, we strive for an approach that empowers and trusts individuals to ‘do the right thing’, and as a team, we try and keep each other true to this.

Recruitment Process:

We are initially looking for resumes and portfolio examples of your work e.g. GitHub repositories, blog articles, etc. If you do not have anything suitable we can provide a problem piece to work together on. From there we filter down and do a series of interviews (remote if required). These are often ‘work’ focused i.e. looking at code together, pair programming for example. Our preference is for candidates to talk to as much of the team as possible so that we, team and candidate, can make the best decision possible.

To apply, please send CV or equivalent with a note outlining why you think you’d be the right person to Katie at [email protected].