Senior Software Engineer

Senior Software Engineer

Vacancy expired!

Groma is one part real-estate firm, one part tech-startup. Our mission is to build cities better. We have two arms to our business. One focuses on acquiring, renovating and developing buildings in the cities where we operate. And the other focuses on enabling people to own parts of their city as it grows and develops around them.

The first part of business is already scaling rapidly. Groma owns and operates 30+ buildings throughout the Greater Boston Area, on track to double that by year’s end. To accomplish that second part of our mission, we’re launching the world’s first real estate backed cryptocurrency later this year. We expect it to achieve a few key goals:

• Enable more people to own more real estate, whether you have $1 or $1,000,000.
• Increase participation in local development to guide better development decisions.
• Provide an independently-governed, anti-inflationary currency backed 1:1 by real estate, combining the best elements of cryptocurrencies with a stable, predictable asset.

And we need to do all this in a way that’s user-friendly, intuitive, compliant with all necessary regulations, and leverages existing, battle-tested standards and technology so it can scale up big.

These are some lofty goals, but we’ve got a good idea of how to get there and are looking for passionate, creative people to join our team and help us build great products, develop great properties, and scale our vision to the world.
About Our CultureGroma is a startup which means we work hard and are constantly evolving to meet new and exciting challenges. A healthy work-life balance is important to our team, but this is likely not your standard 9 to 5. Groma is on a fast growth trajectory and we’re looking for team members ready to dig in and build something special together.

While we’ve mostly been working remotely over the last 18 months, we are investing heavily in our office space in the middle of downtown Boston - right next to the Government Center. We intend to build a strong workplace culture with the flexibility to work from home as needed, but we believe in the power of being together and the mental health benefits of having an “office space” and a “home space.”

We have an ever-evolving list of values and conventions that guide how we operate as a company, but here’s a high-level overview of how we think about doing what we do:

• We’re committed to building an inclusive, equitable, anti-discriminatory workplace that reflects the diversity of people and cultures that live, work and play in the communities we seek to serve.
• We approach our work with pragmatic idealism that enables us to focus on our desire to make the world a better place in ways big and small while also being open to intelligent compromises that accelerate us on our path to serve our broader societal goals
• Our engineering culture believes strongly in a value we shorthand as Justice League, not Superman. The challenges we are trying to solve require effective teams, not individual heroes. (Note: Yes… we are aware that Superman has been a member of the Justice League for quite some time now, but the analogy here is an easy, yet powerful, one for people to grasp. We don’t need a hero, we need a collaborative team of heroes who each bring something unique to the table to help solve problems that any of us individually would find daunting.)

Every day will offer a new challenge because, honestly, we don’t know entirely what we’re doing - just what we’re trying to do. We’re going to build something special, have a great time doing it, and, in the process, create an environment and culture that treats ourselves and others with the ultimate in fairness and respect.
About the PositionWe are looking for an experienced Senior Software Engineer to expand the capabilities of our Engineering Team, our efforts to automate and innovate real estate investment, and our efforts to build the next generation of asset-backed cryptocurrency and the ecosystem surrounding it.

We’re still a very small team and are looking for another Full Stack Engineer who leans a little more towards the Back End and DevOps side of things and can adapt to shifting priorities. If you’re equally passionate about Continuous Deployment, Application Architecture, and Developer Experience, we are looking for you.

Currently we’re working with TypeScript, React, Next.js, Node.js, PostgreSQL, Vercel, AWS, and Github Actions, but we are always looking for the right tool for the job and are open to other options.

As a Senior Software Engineer in the beginning stages of a startup, you’ll be given the chance to help mold the Engineering culture at Groma and steer product and technology decisions at every level of the stack. You’ll be getting hands-on with all sorts of code and working to improve the way the rest of the company works.
Job Functions

• Work with the broader team to try to understand the business end-to-end and engage with the full team in helping to shape our technology roadmap
• Work with the team to build internal tools and applications to support and improve the entire real estate investment process from property identification through acquisition and ongoing management
• Support Groma’s internally and externally facing development efforts; including identifying and maintaining potential Open Source offerings
• Identify and vet existing tools, technologies, and data sources that will help achieve our goals
• Participate in the code review process and provide feedback to other members of the Engineering Team
• Help guide the future direction of our real estate backed cryptocurrency platform and build out functionality to support the novel features we’re developing
• Mentor and guide future team members as we grow the Engineering Team
• Represent the Engineering Team in meetings with the broader team and external partners
• Improve Developer Experience for Engineering Team members by automating workflow

Job Benefits

• Competitive salary for the Boston Area
• Profit share in our constantly growing real estate portfolio
• 5% 401k Match
• Fully covered high-quality health, and dental insurance plans
• Unlimited PTO
• 12 Official Company Holidays
• 1 Floating Holiday: We recognize that there are lots of holidays that are meaningful to different people in different ways and we want to celebrate that by enabling team members to have the time/space to commemorate those days however is appropriate, and using it as an opportunity - if they’d like to - to share the meaning of that day with the broader team.
• Optional pet insurance for cats, dogs, lizards, frogs, and waterfowl

ExperienceWe’re going to break this section down into a few subcategories:

• Essentials: this experience is very likely required for you to succeed and thrive in this position

• Nice-to-Haves: this experience would be beneficial, but isn’t necessary to be successful in this position

• Bonus Points: this experience would make you stand out from other candidates due to its relevance to some potential engineering initiatives

• Dealbreakers: these are some of the things that we are pretty sure aren’t looking for; so if you fall into these categories, we might not be ready for you just yet

It’s okay if you don’t check off every box; our team is still very small, very new, and we aren’t even sure if we got these right - we’re just trying to help give you a picture of who we think we’re looking for.
Essentials

• At least 5 years of real-world, professional Software Engineering experience delivering production-ready code to end users
• Advanced knowledge of at least 1 modern programming language and some experience and familiarity with JavaScript
• Orchestrating DevOps pipelines in CI/CD systems
• Consuming and creating APIs and managing access to endpoints
• Working in a git-based workflow on a team of engineers
• Writing and deploying lambda functions in a serverless platform like AWS, Vercel, etc.
• Working with an SQL database, managing database architecture, and handling database migrations throughout the application development lifecycle

Nice-to-Haves

• Managing infrastructure as code via tools like Terraform, Ansible, etc.
• Building responsive User Interfaces that follow WCAG guidelines
• Managing multiple products and orchestrating releases across multiple codebases or a monorepo

Bonus Points

• Prior startup experience
• Blockchain & Smart Contracts
• Machine Learning
• MLS Feed Integration
• Information Security

Dealbreakers

• entry level: We’d love to hire some of you in the future when we have the bandwidth to dedicate to helping you grow and succeed as part of our Engineering Team, but that’s just not where we’re at yet.

• Remote Workers: Groma HQ is in beautiful, heavily-vaccinated downtown Boston Massachusetts and that’s where we’d like to have all of our Software Engineers, too. We work from home - or the road - when we need to but will need to be able to collaborate in-person as we grow and develop.

• Visa Sponsorships: We’d love to be able to hire some of you in the future, too, but at the moment we’re too small to have the policies and procedures in place to handle work visa sponsorship, but we’ll get there eventually.