Backend Engineer

API and Integrations

At LaunchBrightly, we are on a mission to automate a process that continually takes on-brand and styled screenshots of all your SaaS product features - on desktop, mobile, dark mode, localized, etc. As you update your product, we automatically update your website, help desk and other public collateral with on-brand, consistently styled images. The continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) pipeline and process that engineers adopted over the last decade, is what we ultimately want to build for Support teams. TLDR; LaunchBrightly = CircleCI for the Support team. And we are currently looking to bring onboard a Backend Engineer (API and Integrations).

Everyone at LaunchBrightly is a creator, an owner, or perhaps better, a celebration of the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. Most big companies are afraid of entrusting the future of the company and their software to a few makers, and as they defend against that, they end up with three layers of managers and a product designed by a committee. We want the opposite. We need the opposite as we enter virgin territory trying to build that CI/CD pipeline and process for the Support team. As our customer pushes a new feature to production, we automatically update all her feature images across platforms. This is a thrilling adventure!

Our work is remote, not distant. We believe that being a remote-first organization allows us to build an exceptional team composed of makers and sellers with diverse backgrounds and skill sets from around the globe. Our default work culture is asynchronous and emphasizes written communication to prioritize maker time, focus and company productivity. Our goal is not to eliminate face-to-face interaction, but we should default to a setting where written documentation is so strong that a meeting on most project subject matters would seem odd.

Founded in 2022, and backed by prominent venture firms including IA Ventures and Tuesday Capital, this is a unique opportunity to join this band of misfits on the ground floor. As an early teammate you will be working intimately with the founding team, who has done 0 to 1 five times over while seeing four of them come to an exit.

The Backend Engineer will become an integral member of an initial 5-person team consisting of:

• Maker #1 - Dennis, Founder
• Maker #2 - Hyder, Senior Backend Engineer
• Maker #3 - Jose, Frontend Engineer
• Seller #1 - Josh, Co-founder
• Helper #1 - Vibeke

However, we are looking not just for an Engineer but, rather, a teammate we see as integral to LaunchBrightly’s long-term journey and vital to our success. Someone who is comfortable in the dark and who sees a certain romance, like we do, in embracing the unknowns that come with being on the startup journey. We have a track record of seeing those colleagues who join us on the ground floor of our ventures ride the startup journey to completion (exit) with us, as we grow and become successful together. This is something we take seriously, and something we are extremely proud of!

Job Description

You will be responsible for taking the current MVP version of the Screenshotting and Styling API, architecting a more robust backdrop and designing something other programmers will love to use. The initial customer will be our own App, as a calmer start, but we do want to open up the API to more sophisticated customers who would like to control our screenshotting process more intimately themselves. You will extend the initial MVP feature set to include a pool of new functions:

• Functions that allow us to extract more finely-tuned images from pages, with ever more exotic settings (in a very delicate dance with Puppeteer).
• Functions that help clean up any page, such as removing or modifying elements. This feature set will evolve and you might even build an internal tool, so a team-member (Helper) can go add and manage this list.
• Functions that enhance our output, whether that be injecting elements or running custom JS on the chromium browser instance, or even manipulating raw images post-extraction. Could be text added to input boxes, or squares and arrows pointing to important things on the image.
• A suite of functionality to allow the customer to Style the output, from simple shadows, to headers, to watermarks, and more.

Our infrastructure is set up and managed using AWS Amplify and we embrace a fully serverless environment, which (to a large degree) removes infrastructure as a task. Sure, you’ll probably do some cloudformation overrides on Amplify, but that should be it until we hire somebody to take this on. You are a backend API engineer first and foremost.

Once an image is extracted, cleaned, enhanced and styled, it is stored on our CDN (AWS Cloudfront) and our customer can use it manually from here. However we are excited to write a set of integrations that allow them to sync images automatically to help desks like Zendesk and Intercom, and as time allows, engineer other integrations as any product feature image in a help desk, should ultimately be something our platform could manage.

We are looking for previous experience working with

• Building APIs
• Serverless (Node.js)
• Puppeteer (running chromium on AWS Lambda)
• Canvas implementations in Node.js for styling and image manipulation in general.
• AWS API Gateway
• AWS Amplify for infrastructure setup
• DynamoDB
• GraphQL

What you bring to the table

• A BS or MS in Computer Science or similar, with software development as a focus
• Minimum 3 years of industry experience in backend development
• Pride in writing highly readable, thoroughly tested and reliable code that others can easily jump into
• Strong and precise communication and documentation skills, with a real eagerness to understand and be understood
• A customer-first mentality and passion for understanding and solving customer problems, both present and future
• Joy in producing a useful product that improves the lives of others
• A genuine interest in the startup journey
• A willingness to take initiative and enthusiasm to make an impact and take action

Bonus points

• If you Have previous exposure to dev ops responsibilities on AWS. We are trying to overcome this chore through serverless setups, but having a friend who can also go through a set of logs on Cloudwatch to find a bug is nice

What we offer

• Flexible working hours and locations. Your success is measured on outcomes.
• Excellent start-up culture with openness and inclusiveness
• True ownership and autonomy over your role and the impact on the company
• Prioritization of focus time and productivity
• Your choice of technical setup and equipment
• Experienced founders with many years of successfully building product across multiple ventures
• Opportunities to meet as a team in New York City (we are 100% remote but won't let that stop us from working closely together!)