Full Stack Software Engineer - Community

Substack Inc.; San Francisco, Northern (CA, KY); Hybrid; USD 140,000 - 260,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity

Exceptional benefits

Market-competitive salary

Job summary

Substack is seeking a senior software engineer to join the Community Team in San Francisco. You will build frontend and backend features to help creators manage their communities and connect with readers.

You will collaborate with designers and writers from concept through deployment, owning your work and contributing ideas. The role emphasizes independence, high production standards, and a product-minded approach, with experience in TS, Node/Express, React, and Postgres preferred; ML experience

Qualifications

• 7+ years of software engineering experience.
• Independent and autonomous; capable of owning work and leading.
• Maintain high standards for production systems.
• Take pride in building elegant, delightful product experiences.
• Collaborate with a diverse team and contribute your unique perspective.
• Believe in Substack’s mission to build a better business model for writers.
• Experience with ML technologies is a plus.

Responsibilities

• Build frontend and backend features to help creators manage communities and users connect.
• Collaborate with designers, writers, support staff, and others from concept to deployment; own your work autonomously.
• Work with TypeScript, Node/Express, React, and Postgres; willingness to learn if needed.

Skills

Independent & autonomous

Leadership

Collaboration

Product-minded

Tools

TypeScript

Node/Express

React

Postgres

Job description

Substack is building a new economic engine for culture, giving the brightest, most interesting, and most creative people on the internet the power of their own publishing platform. The terms of our culture should not be set by gate-keeping legacy media or chaos-fueling social media, but by the people who actually make and participate in that culture. Substack’s model, based on direct subscriptions, has fueled an explosion of independent publishing. It empowers creators with economic autonomy, creative ownership, and a direct connection to their most engaged audiences.

About the Community Team

We’re working on the next frontier of products and features to help Substack creators connect and manage their community. This ranges from DMs to Substack Chat to entirely new products.

Our team brainstorms with the CEO, Chris Best, and each engineer contributes ideas for new products and UI/UX upgrades to existing products. Ultimately those ideas become internal prototypes, and then become products shipped to our millions of users.

We’re a small team of generalists, so we especially value an interest in working across our tech stack, willingness to prototype, and product-mindedness.

Responsibilities

• Build frontend and backend (and sometimes mobile) features that help creators manage their communities, and users connect more deeply within these communities.
• Collaborate with designers, writers, support staff, and many others. From product concept and research to implementation and deployment, we expect you to own your work and operate autonomously.
• We work with TypeScript, especially Node/Express and React, and Postgres. It’s helpful if you know these technologies already; if not, we’ll be excited to help you learn.

Requirements

• At least 7+ years of software engineering experience.
• Independent and autonomous. We’re too small to micromanage, and expect that every person at the company owns their work and can be a leader.
• Hold yourself and others to a high standard when working on production systems.
• Take pride in building elegant and delightful product experiences. Substack works best when it gets out of the way so writers can focus on writing and connecting with their readers.
• Enjoy collaboration with a diverse group of thinkers while bringing our own unique experience and background to the team.
• Believe in Substack’s mission to build a better business model for writers.
• Experience working with ML technology would be beneficial.

Experience at a fast-growing startup or working on a high-performing growth team is not required, but is a plus.

• Substack's compensation package includes a market competitive salary, equity for all full time roles, and exceptional benefits.
• Our cash compensation salary range for this role is $140,000 - $260,000.
• Final offer amounts are determined by multiple factors including candidate experience and expertise and may vary from the amounts listed above.

Substack is an equal opportunity employer. All applicants will be considered for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex (including pregnancy, sexual orientation, gender identity or transgender status), age, national origin, veteran or disability status. We’re seeking people passionate about enabling independent expression and building a better business model for creators. If you want to see what media, communities, and content can become when unmoored from advertising models, and you have the skills and experience to contribute, we’d love to meet you.

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