Overview

We're looking for a Principal Engineer. Headquartered in Los Angeles, California, Right Balance provides top-tier technology talent for innovative companies in the US. We’re in the top 50 companies to watch in LA.

Engagement Details

What We Do We're the first and largest peer-to-peer marketplace for laundry. Our customers tap the app and outsource their laundry. For them, it’s life without laundry, because we hacked it out of existence. But we solve a second problem too, which is that more and more people of varying backgrounds want to work from home. Luckily, most people have an underutilized washer/dryer, which when combined with our Laundry Pro app, provides the first-ever manual labor work-from-home gig in the world. For all our users, we're a marketplace for a better life.

Our Progress Perfect product market fit drove a 100x surge in users & revenue and double-digit MoM growth over the past few years. In 2021 we scaled to 500+ markets throughout the United States. In March 2022 we closed a $10m seed round which included VC investments from Headline, Origin Ventures, Starting Line VC, Ludlow Ventures, and Clean Ventures, as well as notable angel investments from Max Mullen, co-founder of Instacart, Steven Galanis, Co-founder and CEO of Cameo, Joanna Riley, CEO and co-founder of Censia, and Rob Chesnut, Chief Ethics Officer for Airbnb. Significant growth continued in 2022 and 2023.

The Role

• As Principal Engineer, you’ll be responsible for creating and driving the technical strategy for the user experience as well as the technical infrastructure. You will champion the technology selection and best practices in our app, web development, and backend. You will lead the way in bringing technical excellence and innovation to our codebase and infrastructure. You must love to code, and want to spend most of your time doing so.
• Duties and responsibilities
• Drive technical excellence for the engineering team, with focus on technical quality and stability.
• Work with your engineering counterparts to execute on product strategy and build world-class products and features that our users will love.
• Contribute to the full development cycle: technical design, development, test, experimentation, analysis, and launch. You’ll be reviewing code and design docs, giving feedback on product specs and mocks.
• Final reviewer on PRs
• Contribute to code
• Execute on the product road map, including ensuring that customers are matched with high quality Laundry Pros, facilitating a seamless order flow for customers and Laundry Pros from web or app, enabling recurring orders, geo-based dynamic pricing, expansion to Canada, and more.
• Achieve and maintain world-class product velocity.
• Constantly review our technical infrastructure, propose improvements and additions, and execute on agreed upon initiatives.
• Make architecture decisions for the team and effectively communicate them to your colleagues.
• Review designs and feature ideas from Product and determine and communicate scope and schedule.

Tech Stack Our tech stack is mostly TypeScript, allowing engineers to implement end-to-end functionality. On the frontend we use Angular/Ionic and on the backend Firebase with Node.js.

What’s in it for you

1. Learn and evolve your skills using the latest and greatest technology tools in a rapidly growing company.
2. Learn from the best people around you. We constantly challenge the status quo and invent new ways of building a great product.
3. Flexible hours. Join daily standups, sprint planning, and retrospective meetings. Other than that, you’re in control of your own schedule.
4. Work on challenging problems, innovate, and positively impact many people's lives while having fun doing it.

Required Qualifications

• Upper-intermediate to fluent speaking and writing English. Able to have a real-time conversation.
• 10+ years of full-time hands-on Software Engineering experience.
• 4+ years of full-time hands-on Node.js backend experience.
• 3+ years of full-time hands-on Frontend (Angular, or React.js, or Vue.js, or React Native) experience.
• 3+ years of full-time hands-on Mobile Development experience.
• 2+ years of full-time hands-on Typescript experience.
• Ideally, the right candidate has demonstrated organizational-wide impacting experience building mobile consumer-facing applications at scale.
• You are coding now and want to keep coding.
• Strong organizational skills, the ability to prioritize tasks and keep projects on schedule.
• Entrepreneurial spirit. You are self-directed, driven, innovative, and biased towards action in fast-paced environments.
• You love to build new things. You care about innovation.
• Can code in a multitude of languages but is highly proficient with Typescript.
• Well-versed in front-end, backend, and DevOps technologies.
• Experience implementing and monitoring metrics for cloud services.
• Strong problem-solving and troubleshooting skills.
• Self-motivated and a desire to work in a high velocity, async environment.

Nice to haves

1. Firebase experience.
2. Ionic experience.
3. Angular experience.
4. Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or equivalent demonstrated ability.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are your typical clients?

The majority of our clients are venture-backed startups at the growth stage. Usually, at this stage, the company already achieved a product-market fit and is looking to expand rapidly. That’s where we bring the best engineering practices, strong architecture, the latest technologies, and consistent processes to help companies scale.

What is the length of your engagements?

Most of our long-term full-time engagements last multiple years. It allows you to evolve your career with the client company taking on more responsibilities.

What’s your company size?

The Right Balance team is 60+ engineers going to 100+ by the end of the year. The current client size team is 141+ people. The timing is great to be a part of a rapidly growing team making meaningful contributions.

What happens if the engagement is completed?

Most of our engagements are long-term in nature. That said, if the current engagement is ramping down, we’ll present you with more long-term opportunities to transition into.

What are your core values?

Client First: we only win when our clients win. We treat client challenges as our own.

Ownership: we embrace responsibility, taking on challenges, getting them to completion, and enjoying getting things done.

Quality: we’re passionate about achieving quality outcomes by applying meticulous attention to detail.