(Senior) Clojure Backend Developer

Whimsical is not like most companies. We are completely independent and believe that a business should care about more than just making money. We are philosophy-driven. Whimsical is remote-first — we're a small team of 12 people, spread across the globe.

At Whimsical, we're trying to do two things:

Build world-class collaboration tools that are fast and delightful.

Create a company that does good in the world and that is a joy to work at.

We believe in:

• Sustainability: We work a calm, 40-hour work week. Compensation is fair and transparent and does not depend on where in the world you live. We are committed to doing our part to help the environment.
• Ethics over growth and profit: We don't believe in growth at all costs or that growth should be our chief goal. Growth for us is a sign that we are building things that provide value for people. Growth also means that we can deploy more of our resources toward the things that we value.
• Craftsmanship: We care deeply about our work. We are specialists, eager learners, and persistent in our pursuit of quality work. We're patient and committed because building great things takes time.
• Long-term focus: We're building Whimsical for the long-haul, not a quick exit. As partners in this business, we seek to invest our time instead of selling it. We think about which decisions we will be most proud of 10+ years from now.
• See our Blog for more insight into how Whimsical does business differently.
• And we are now looking to share the joy of working on Whimsical with a Senior Clojure Backend Developer, our 13th teammate.

How we work:

For product work we use an adapted version of Basecamp's Shape Up approach, which for us means:

• We work in cycles of 6 weeks of focused work and 2 weeks of cool-down.
• Each 6-week work cycle sees one or more "bets" shipped, each having very specific and well-defined requirements.
• During cool-down, each of us choose what we want to work on, be it bugs, minor features, tech debt, exploring new concepts, and more.
• Each of us can create an "idea pitch" for an upcoming cycle, and move our ideas along.
• As a back-end developer at Whimsical, you'll be contributing to all things server and infrastructure-based, be it backend code, database optimizations, managing infrastructure, or ensuring that our servers are alive and healthy. And being a small company means that sometimes contributing to Frontend and other areas of the product shouldn't be a deal-breaker to you.
• In addition to Shape Up, we also occasionally roll up our sleeves and do customer support to better understand our users and their needs, regardless of our role within the company.
• Our primary mode of operation is asynchronous. We use real-time communication with great care, and only where it makes sense. We use Whimsical, email, Slack, and Zoom for our day-to-day communication.
• But we also believe in spending quality time together, which is why we try to bring everyone from around the world together at least twice a year for what we call "Whimsical Summits". At Summits we focus on getting to know each other better and building bonds that help us communicate better when we're apart. The ongoing global pandemic has prevented us from doing this for the last couple of months, but we hope to go back to this mode of operation as soon as possible.

At Whimsical you can expect your day-to-day to include:

• Scoping, understanding, and implementing features: You'd work with other teammates to figure out the best way to take a Shape Up pitch from an idea to deployment within the cycle.
• Support our customers: We have awesome customers, and supporting them often includes getting some help from the person that implemented the particular feature a customer is having issues with.
• Support the team: Review pull requests, refactor code, help with both technical and non-technical issues, and in general help each of us end the day better than when we woke up.
• Taking on-call duties in your time zone: We try to take advantage of the fact that we're a small, geographically distributed team by delegating the first-responder duties to the people who are awake at that particular moment.
• Indicators that this could be a good role for you
• You feel that our philosophy resonates with you and you can see it guiding your decisions while at Whimsical.
• You have 5+ years of backend development experience.
• You have experience building and maintaining complex systems.
• You feel comfortable using Clojure and functional programming in general to solve non-trivial problems (Bonus: you've used Clojure in a production environment before).
• You have previous experience running systems in the cloud (Bonus: specific experience with AWS)
• You have previous experience with running production workloads in containers (Bonus: specific experience with AWS ECS)
• You have experience in measuring, analyzing, and fixing performance problems in a distributed environment.
• You're able to work autonomously and stay self-motivated. (Bonus: previous experience working in a remote team).
• You are fluent in English.
• All information collected through this application is stored in Workable, Whimsical's Applicant Tracking System, where it will be used for recruitment purposes only.

Requirements:

We're currently looking for somebody with sufficient overlap to our existing team, so you'd have to be living in US/Canada/Europe, between Mountain Time/-6 UTC and Central European Time/+1 UTC. (We will still review applicants outside of these time zones in case we have need of developers in other time zones in the future.)

A resume or manually entered experience (you can choose your preference).

Thoughtful, thorough responses to all the application questions.

Benefits:

• 100% remote team
• Annual salary starting at $134,277 (depending on experience)
• Equity starting at 0.95% (depending on experience)
• Fully paid health insurance*
• 4 weeks of paid time off per year
• 4 weeks of paid parental leave
• 401k matching*

The equipment you need to work successfully, including a computer, peripherals, co-working, etc.

* Availability may depend on your location and our current administrative capabilities there.

Before you apply, please check if any restrictions apply in terms of time zone or country.

This job has a geo-restriction in place: -6 UTC /+1 UTC..