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onetext-engineering.md

OneText Engineering

We are OneText!

onetext.com

Technology

  • Front-end: TypeScript/React/Tailwind/Next.js
  • API: Node/TypeScript/Postgres/Redis/Mongo
  • Services: Shopify/WooCommerce/Twilio/Telnyx/Infobip/PayPal/Stripe/Authorize.net
  • Cloud/Hosting: DigitalOcean

Want to bring a great new technology to the table? Let's talk!

Traction

  • Completed YCombinator Winter '23 batch
  • Closed our seed funding round in May 2023
  • Onboarded onto hundreds of ecommerce brands, with rapidly growing payment volume and revenue

What we've built

Over the last few years, we've built:

  • A consumer wallet which links your credit card, PayPal account, or even Bitcoin to your phone number
  • A payment experience that allows you to make purchases with just a one text message
  • A merchant facing dashboard allowing sms campaigns, automations, customer support, reporting and more
  • Integration with Shopify and WooCommerce for ecommerce
  • Integrations with Twilio, Telnyx and Infobip for SMS, MMS and Whatsapp
  • Integrations with PayPal, Stripe, Authorize.net, and Maverick for payments and card processing
  • AI powered conversational SMS-based sales/marketing/payments flows
  • One time payments, scheduled payments, automatic payments (subscriptions/refills)
  • Custom Flows - json engine for building conversational flows/automations and receiving payments

What we want to build

We have the foundation of an amazing platform. Now we know what works, and what our customers want, our goal is to make it work really well, and make it work really fast -- and look great in the process.

  • A world class dashboard and checkout experience for our merchants and their customers
  • New and more advanced conversational AI-powered flows
  • Even easier and more powerful ways for consumers to pay with one text
  • Scaling to send millions of outbound text messages in as short a time as possible for our biggest brands

Articles

OneText

Engineering Culture

  • We don't do fixed meetings/standups/planning other than a quick weekly eng sync. If we need to meet, we jump on a quick ad-hoc video call.
  • Emphasis is on building and testing MVPs:
    1. Agree on an idea, get it 60-70% defined
    2. Agree on a good public interface (harder to change later)
    3. Build a working MVP with enough logs to gauge its success, and enough tests that it will be stable in production
    4. If it works, formalize it: cover all the edge cases, write all the tests, etc.
    5. If it doesn't work, kill it.
  • Each unit of engineering work should be something we can build and deploy in a max of a week. If not, we try to break it up into smaller component parts.
  • Try to have a discrete things owned by a single person, to avoid stepping on each others' toes where possible.
  • Emphasis on learning. If you have the experience to do something, great! But if not we want to help you learn and help you teach yourself. We also want to learn new stuff from you!
  • Priorities can shift around quite rapidly. We tend to do more 'kanban' style, and keep the units of work small enough that we can keep delivering good stuff even if priorities change.

Us

  • Jonathan and Daniel - quit PayPal a few years back to found OneText, never looked back
  • Around 10 total employees including engineering, sales, and customer success

You

Most important thing I need is someone who:

  • Is motivated
  • Can learn fast
  • Communicates well and asks difficult questions
  • Can code, and adapt to new technologies
  • Can work full stack, and learn any gaps

In the long term, I'd love for this role to go someone who can:

  • Grow into a senior leadership role as the company grows.
  • Help hire and lead more engineers
  • Help architect and decide on the future of the OneText platform

Questions

When we chat I don't want it to be a surprise quiz or anything stupid like that. Here are some examples of the things I will probably ask:

  • What was your last/current role, and why do you want to change now?
  • What's your ideal next role? If you had carte-blanche, what would the position, responsibilities, engineering culture etc. look like?
  • Can you show me some code you wrote or an app or platform or library that you're proud of building, and talk me through how it works?
  • When Jonathan first pitched me on building a new product with SMS I thought it was a bit silly. Why does it appeal to you?
  • What was the most interesting or challenging integration you've done with another platform, or API?
  • Do you lean more towards building UX, front-end, apis, working with databases, or do you like to be 'full stack' and go where you're most needed?
  • Why a startup? Why not join a big corp?
  • What do you hate about <insert technology> you've used in the past? If you had full creative control, what would you change about it?
  • What's your preferred approach to testing, static checks, etc? And do you like TDD?
  • Let's pair-code something in the language/framework of your choice. I prefer real-world exercises, so no algorithms. I may ask you to build a small front-end component or write a small helper function, depending on your preference. Ideally let's just do a screen share, if that's ok -- so please come with your favorite IDE ready.
  • Do you see yourself as more of an individual contributor, or do you aspire to be more of an engineering lead as we grow and hire?
  • Do you like to have engineering requirements completely set in stone before you start work, or are you comfortable starting building based on a mostly-formed idea that will evolve over time?
  • Tell me about a time you said no to someone in a position of power over you (your boss, a super senior architect, the ceo, etc.)
  • Tell me about something you did in the past that ended up being way too complicated, and how you helped simplify it.
  • What's YOUR favorite interview question, to pick a good engineer?
  • What's something cool you've done with AI recently?

Our office

  • We're based out of the City Club in the heart of San Francisco.
  • The office is open all week, but the engineering team usually tries to be in the office together on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays at least.
  • It's a fantastic place to work with a ton of amenities; a variety of working spaces, coffee/snacks, a gym, and of course a whiskey and cigar room...
  • We usually do a big team lunch on Fridays

Operational stuff

  • How soon would you want to start?
  • What are your comp expecations?
  • Is your preference in-person or remote?

Structure

Loose structure:

  1. Half hour chat, let's get to know each other, see if it's a good fit w/ Daniel.
  2. Quick coding exercise (either pair coding with Daniel or offline, your choice)
  3. 60-90 mins of technical and culture topics (mostly questions above) w/ Daniel (+ Jonathan if available)
  4. 30 mins w/ Daniel and Jonathan

Want to be respectful of your time, but also want to give enough time to make sure we can answer all your questions too! So we can always extend any of these sessions or set follow ups if you prefer.

Also happy to do in-person for anything after step 1, if you're in the Bay Area.

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