Software Developer

Vessel is hiring Software Developers of all levels to join a small and capable team of builders working on a cloud-based fintech web app. Tech includes TypeScript, SvelteKit, Node, Nix, Docker, Terraform, and AWS.

What we do

There’s a fast growing demand for investments in private funds (private equity, venture capital, etc.) coinciding with a wave of democratization for these investments, but there’s still too much friction in the investment experience. Interactions between fund managers and their investors happen on too many different platforms (e.g., datarooms, investor portals, online document signing software, etc.) that look like they were built in the 90s and don’t speak with each other. Seasoned institutional investors are unimpressed and investors that are new to private markets are overwhelmed by the investment process. Fundraising is hard enough and few fund managers want to spend millions to build custom software or hire armies of investor relations professionals to chase after investors.

Vessel was built by former private market investors and fund managers (from firms such as Inovia Capital, Teralys Capital and Power Sustainable) that have been very successful at fundraising and managing investor relations. Our mission is to make investing in private funds easy (almost as easy as investing in a stock on Wealthsimple) and make fundraising less painful. We’re a white-label SaaS platform for fund managers and investor relations teams to wow investors and manage all parts of the relationship with investors, from marketing an investment opportunity to onboarding investors, and sharing news and financial reports.

Vessel has already helped fund managers close tens of millions of dollars, grown more than 20x since last year and signed some of the most well-established fund managers in the industry.

Our team is nimble, we’re growing fast, and we’ve built something that people love. We’re making money and are well-funded (backed by some top investors).

About the work

You’ll be working on features such as identity verification, website builders, scheduled payment collection, and electronic document signing. That’s just to name a few. Vessel is a SaaS. We build tools so that our customers – other businesses – can delight their own customers. And our bar is high. Our customers require a wide range of tools to help them market a fund, invite broad networks of investors, manage and sign contracts, and eventually collect many millions of dollars of funds from their investors.

Vessel is young and very well capitalized. Right now, early customers and feedback have given us strong conviction in our vision and you will be building the aforementioned products with us. A lot of features exist, and a lot more features need to be created. You’ll be writing code and designing features with the CTO, 5 developers, and a product designer.

Writing is important. Both technical and product, we write our ideas down and critique them. Ultimately you’re working to solve our customers' problems. The team is composed of product-minded developers and you are expected to contribute beyond code.

We’re all-in on SvelteKit for the web app and Node for the backend. We use protobuf as our IDL between the two layers. You’ll be writing it all in TypeScript, covering it with automated testing, and continuously deploying it to AWS via pipelines we’ve build ourselves. We love Managed Relational Databases and leveraging various encryption mechanisms to ensure the safety and security of our customers' very sensitive information.

Most of your time will be spent on the above. Sometimes things go wrong and production bugs happen. Usually it’s not an issue and we don’t expect perfection. But when dealing with customer money, even a visual bug can cause customers stress. So part of this job means making a big deal out of small problems to retain customer trust. You will occasionally be on-call which might mean getting woken up at midnight to fix things when it’s your turn.

If you’ve read Shape Up or Mythical Man Month, and you liked the surgical team or really want to work in cycles, you’ll fit right in here. You will work with a small and capable team across software, product, finance, and ops to build the right product. We don’t work in sprints. We don’t collect daily updates of everything you did yesterday. We work in highly autonomous, outcome-focused cycles that last multiple weeks. We do not wait for minutiae to be clarified. We instead drive to solutions by acting in the best interest of the company and the customer.

After every cycle is a cooldown week. You will spend this week taking strategic technical decisions on your own. Nobody will assign you tasks. You are expected to surface important problems and fix them yourself.

About you

Vessel is looking to add one software developer to the team. Everyone on the team is expected to wear multiple hats, but that does not mean you need to know them all to join. You might be new in your career, or an experienced back-end developer who wants to learn SvelteKit, or a self-taught full-stack developer that feels right at home in all these technologies. Everyone is expected to be a learner, but nobody is expected to be an expert in every technology we use from day one.

You must be comfortable with most of our basics. Relational databases, SQL, TypeScript, HTTP semantics (e.g. authentication mechanisms; server, proxy, and client caching; common headers) and browser technologies (HTML, CSS, JavaScript). What you aren’t comfortable with, you are someone who will learn these things quickly.

Reproducibility is important. We use Nix to pin developer dependencies and Docker for production artifacts. Avoiding introducing randomness into any stage of development will need to become reflexive for you. You’re comfortable on the command line and a portable Unix toolchain.

You are annoyed if we’re loading the same heavy asset six times in the client and slowing down first page load. But you don't sink a full day into optimizing the last 400 bytes of a compressed image below-the-fold. You’re capable of balancing returns – the customer and developer experience – and investments on your own.

You prefer operational tooling and infrastructure auditability to manual changes. In an emergency, you will opt to use admin UIs and make manual changes to recover the service. And you will then make note of your changes to write runbooks, infra-as-code, and ops tools to fix them the second time.

Lastly, you may or may not have a degree. What matters is that you want to do the job and can learn to fill in the gaps. Your experience is important. And where you lack experience, you show potential and unwavering commitment.

Pay and job details

We believe in transparent and competitive compensation. The salary ranges from $100,000 to $160,000 depending on level. Vessel pays based on the potential value of your contributions to our company, not the amount of year of experience you have.

You will also be offered equity in the company.

Our health and dental coverage plan is generous and above market. You’ll get 20 days of paid vacation and 5 paid sick days. Additionally, everyone gets another full week (sometimes more!) paid vacation between Christmas and New Year while the whole office is closed and we don’t worry about emails from colleagues.

The role is hybrid and our offices are in Mile End. You must be comfortable coming to the office twice a week. Vessel trusts everyone to do their best work where they please while simultaneously valuing physical connections in-office. For 60 days a year, you can decide where and how you work with no expectation of office presence. We just ask that you overlap with the Eastern timezone 4 hours a day.

What to expect

To apply to the role, you’ll need a resume that helps us gauge your suitability for this role. If you don’t have the experience, then showcase your skills and potential in writing by telling us about something you’ve done, something relevant to the work we do, or something that excites you. You don’t need a fancy job history.

After we review your application, you will either be invited to do a virtual video interview with us or you will be notified via email that we will not be proceeding with your application. Please give us a few days to get back to you.

We’ll aim to make the interview process as quick and as painless as possible, and encourage everyone to apply if they think they’re ready to do some of the best work of their careers.

Vessel looks forward to hearing from you!

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