Product Engineer

Layer; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 120,000 - 180,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive salary

Top equity

Employee equity plan

Health insurance

Lunch in-office

Job summary

Layer is seeking engineers who can build a team and a company, not just a first-rate product. We value solving from first principles, curiosity about tech and business, and ownership in product and team decisions.

Our stack includes Kotlin, React, Ktor, Postgres (RDS), Exposed, Kotest/JUnit, Github Actions, and containerized ECS with Betterstack and Sentry for visibility.

Qualifications

• 4+ years of experience on strong software teams.
• Experience with the highs and lows of building new products from scratch.
• A track record of growth in team leadership.

Responsibilities

• Own product and team decisions and drive alignment with stakeholders.
• Collaborate with engineers, product, and design to ship scalable features.
• Mentor teammates and help the team grow their strengths.

Skills

Leadership

First-principles thinking

Customer empathy

Ownership

Strategic thinking

Cross-functional collaboration

Tools

Kotlin

React

Ktor

Postgres (RDS)

Exposed

Kotest/JUnit

Github Actions

Containerized ECS

Betterstack

Sentry

Job description

The Role

We want engineers who can build a team and a company, not just a best-in-class product. We believe that certainly takes broad technical competence across our tech stack, but it also takes harder to find abilities, such as…

• Thinking forward from first principles and backwards from customer needs at the same time.
• Curiosity about both technical and business problems.
• Navigating competing priorities and tradeoffs using your own mental map of company goals.
• A desire for ownership in product & team decisions.
• Loving people and wanting to make your teammates around you better at their own strengths.

We think world class early-stage engineers often share some common background experience, such as:

• 4+ years of experience on strong software teams
• Experience with the highs and lows of building new products from scratch
• A track record of growth in team leadership

That said, we deeply appreciate and admire people who take initiative to pursue problems & opportunities they care about, so we are always excited to meet folks who reach out even if they don’t fit that exact profile.

Our Stack

We don’t index on how familiar candidates are with our tech stack. That’s one of the benefits of hiring excellent engineers: we’re confident you’ll get up to speed and we’re confident the rest of the team can help you do it. That said, we want everyone to be excited about the environment and tool kit they’ll have on day one.

• API language: Kotlin
• Embedded components: React
• API framework: Ktor
• Database: Postgres (RDS)
• ORM: Exposed
• Testing: Kotest/JUnit
• CI/CD: Github Actions
• Deployment: Containerized ECS service behind API Gateway
• Monitoring/visibility/logging: Betterstack & Sentry

Benefits

• Competitive seed-stage salary
• Top of market equity
• An employee friendly equity plan
• Health/dental/vision
• Lunch in-office