Backend Software Engineer

tl;dr: Early-stage startup hiring a couple remote backend software developers. We're seeking to improve people's metabolic health using new wearables and insights. Details about us, the role, and interview process below.

Who We Are

Levels is an early-stage startup working to improve peoples' metabolic health.

Poor metabolic health is a risk factor for many diseases, and few people have the right tools to create positive feedback cycles with their diet and exercise. We've seen massive value of using wearables, including continuous glucose monitors, to help behavioral change.

We're still in the scrappy startup phase, so are looking for people who are comfortable with ambiguity and having wide impact. We've been remote-first since Day 1, and care a ton about communication, autonomy, curiosity, and initiative.

We've been running a Beta pilot since 2019, and have thousands of happy paying customers who are using Levels to stabilize their energy levels, lose weight, optimize athletic performance, and learn strategies to reduce their risk of chronic disease. We came off the closed Beta for current Levels app in summer of 2022, and are now working on a CGM-optional version of our product offering to make it more affordable for our users.

Our team is highly experienced, and has started and sold companies before. We also love learning from each other, and are looking for people who bring a new set of experiences and backgrounds to our team.

Reference Content

• ‎LEVELS - A Whole New Level: #39 - The Levels cultural handbook (Sam Corcos & Josh Clemente) on Apple Podcasts
• ‎LEVELS - A Whole New Level: #55 - Traveling the world & becoming a software engineer (Ben Grynol & Stephanie Coates) on Apple Podcasts

Role Overview

First and foremost, we're looking for people who are excited about what we're doing—you don't need to know anything about metabolic health, but should be excited to learn. We're building in an entirely new space, so you'll be able to use creativity to help us solve problems and delight our customers.

Our back end web stack is Node/Typescript, Postgres, Redis, GraphQL, and deployed using Aptible and AWS. We use React Native and GraphQL for mobile, as well as React and tRPC on the front end.

As a backend software engineer, here are some common role responsibilities:

• Design and implement maintainable backend services, including data processing pipelines, APIs, etc
• Help us scale to process billions of data points per month
• Build integrations between us and our partners (physicians, coaches, other wearable platforms, etc)
• Create interfaces to help our customers understand complex data and relationships between what they eat and how their body responds

This list is not exhaustive at all, and you'll have a lot of autonomy over your work. Our team is composed of a diverse group of product-minded and mission-driven engineers.

Reference Content

• ‎LEVELS - A Whole New Level: #35 - Building our Engineering Team (Michael Mizrahi & Andrew Conner) on Apple Podcasts
• ‎LEVELS - A Whole New Level: #11 - One billion data points (Andrew Conner & Ben Grynol) on Apple Podcasts

Why you might be excited about us

1. We're working to solve a massive global problem and help people be healthier. If you're into health/wellness, fitness, and wearables, you'll love helping build our product.
2. We're small, so you'll be able to contribute efficiently and without bureaucracy. You'll quickly have responsibility over big areas of our product.
3. We don't have a ton of meetings. As in, most days, engineers have zero. We believe in slow thought, and if we can effectively solve a problem asynchronously, we do. When we do meet synchronously, you'll always have the opportunity to contribute.
4. Our team has a wide range of experiences (YCombinator founder, Google leads, medical physician, keeping the astronauts alive at SpaceX, etc) and are excited to learn from you, too.
5. You'll be able to work remotely and set your own schedule. We don't micro-manage and will help you do great work. Most of our engineers work US hours, but organize their work day to be whatever's best for them.
6. We'll mould your role to shape a career you're excited about. We care a ton about your satisfaction and job happiness, and will help prep you for whatever you're looking for in the future.
7. We work hard and also highly value balanced work/life. We care about family and your own personal development, and expect you to regularly step away from work and create a healthy distance.

Reference Content

• ‎LEVELS - A Whole New Level: #42 - Why remote and async teams should use Loom (Vinay Hiremath & Sam Corcos) on Apple Podcasts
• ‎LEVELS - A Whole New Level: #49 - Solving synchronicity with asynchronous communication (Sam Corcos, Andrew Conner & Scott Klein) on Apple Podcasts

Why you might not be excited about us

1. We're small (~60 people in the company now), so if you like more established companies, it's not (yet) the right time. You'll help build our company's culture.
2. Since we're an early stage startup, projects and priorities may shift. We’re also pre-product-market-fit, which means there’s a lot of moving parts and big challenges we’re solving for.
3. Our customers love us, and there's a lot we can improve. It's a great place to be, but means there's some jank. (Nothing too scary! 😃)
4. We can't (yet) provide close mentorship for junior developers, especially as we're remote and small. As we grow, we'll get a lot better at this.
5. Since you'll have a lot of responsibility and creativity over projects, they may not be defined perfectly initially. You'll be expected to bring your own experience and perspective to help us do the right things, and raise flags if you think we should do things differently.
6. We strongly adhere to our values, especially around treating people like adults and we’re a team, not family. This means we talk about the hard things (such as the financial realities of our stage and burn rate) and push for excellence and results.

Reference Content

• ‎LEVELS - A Whole New Level: #52 - What is a Directly Responsible Individual? (Ben Grynol & Scott Klein) on Apple Podcasts

Requirements

Qualities that will make you most effective at Levels

1. Love thinking broadly and creatively about problems in order to solve them efficiently.
2. Worked remotely before, or know that you'd work well with a remote team.
3. Excited for a front-row seat into a fast growing, early stage company. Things will change a lot!
4. Embrace challenges with a positive, we can fix this, attitude.
5. Preference for ambiguity, open-ended problems. Solve them with ownership and growth mindset.
6. Build trust with team and show transparency. Humble and willing to help others.
7. Enjoy thinking through trade-offs, with both mindfulness of short-term needs and our long-term direction.
8. Experience with TypeScript or JavaScript (or excited to learn TypeScript), and using/building GraphQL APIs.
9. Experience designing maintainable systems, APIs, and integrations.
10. Happy writing documentation so that others can ramp up super easily and you're never a single-source-of-failure.

Our current development practices

Since we're an early-stage startup, we constantly have to ask "what gets the most value, cheaply, to validate our assumptions?" We build some things to last a long time, and others as prototypes.

We use code reviews, linting, e2e testing, CI, observability, logging, and production probers. We've documented both our web and mobile apps so that you should be able to get started easily and contribute your first day.

Our team has previously built products that served tens of millions of customers per day, so we recognize the value of maintainability and keeping our developer experience nimble. We deploy our backend several times a day, and release our mobile app weekly.

You'll help push us to be our best, and we're excited for recommendations and insights you have as you join. You'll be an owner and contribute towards how we work.

Joining Our Team

Interview process

We want you at your best, and won't be giving you gotcha-style algorithms questions. We want to get to know you, hear about what you're interested in, and learn about what you hope to do in the future.

(As a note, these stages might be subject to change! We'll communicate with you if so!)

1. Meet us and learn about Levels

You'll first talk to Nicole on our People Ops team and won't need to prepare anything in advance. The goal of this conversation is to get to know you and mutually explore if we might be a good fit for each other. You'll learn more about Levels and have a chance to ask any questions about our company, team culture, and product.

If we're both excited to continue, we'll send along a bunch of information about the company that you can go through on our own time. You'll then have the opportunity to chat with other people in our company to learn more about them and the company.

2. Technical discussion

We'll have another conversation to talk in depth about your technical experience. We'll talk about frameworks you've used, how you make technical decisions, types of problems you like to solve, while deep dive into some project(s) that can best demonstrate your skills.

This is primarily used to get a better feel for your experience, how you work, and where you may fit in.

3. Technical challenges

There will be two live technical challenge sessions:

1. A pair coding session where we'll work through some problems together. There will be no algorithm gotchas or brain-teasers, so we can focus on problem-solving, coding and debugging skills.
2. A system design session where we’ll discuss how to design backend systems to solve real-life problems. It will be open-ended with no absolute right or wrong answers, just like real-life design discussions.

Alongside these two live sessions, we'll ask you to teach us something technical async, so we can see how you like to communicate technical topics in a remote environment. We'll include full details about this when we get here.

4. Reference conversations

We will talk to a few people you've worked with before to learn more about how we can best work with you. We expect to hear great things, so this is primarily so we can work with you as effective as possible.

Benefits

Compensation & Benefits

You can see read more about our benefits (Careers at Levels), which includes medical, dental, and vision insurance in addition to generous paid time off policies.

The compensation for this role includes salary, equity, and our employee benefits package. The target salary for this role is level dependent, and ranges from $130,000/yr - $220,000/yr, which may be adjusted higher or lower in exchange for less or more equity during the offer phase.

We determine our compensation using 75th percentile benchmark data from Carta for companies of our size & stage, based on the San Francisco / Bay Area market regardless of where in the world you live. You can read our transparent Levels Compensation Philosophy - April 2023.

Getting Started

⭐ If you're excited to learn more, fill out this form.

If we think you might be a fit, we'll respond within 48 hours. Please let us know if you have timing constraints. Regardless, we'll try our best to respect your time along the process.

No recruiters or agencies, please. Thanks!