We're hiring someone to lead our backend engineering. The purpose of this letter is to help you decide if this role is right for you. And if it turns out this is a fit, my claim is that you will be hard-pressed to find something more meaningful and impactful for your life and career.It will take you some time to read through, but if you do, you should learn something new, have a clear sense of what we're working on, and know if you'll thrive in our current environment. You won't find traditional requirements. Mostly because this isn't a traditional role. For the right person, this could be a once-in-lifetime chance to do something that matters and propel your personal growth.Thanks in advance for reading and sleep well,LeonCo-founder, CTO @ Rise Science<hr><h2>What are we working on at Rise Science?</h2>The short answer: we're building a sleep app for everyday people that helps you be less tired and get more out of your day.
Sleep is the most potent performance enhancing drug there is. It's the foundation of literally everything we can measure about you. And it's your nights that dictate your days.Read about how we got started: <a href="https://www.notion.so/Founder-Story-c65ae47f62014c4ba6ebdf02280d4c0b">Our founders' journey to sleep and its importance</a>.You might ask “Does the world need another sleep app?” The answer is, no, it doesn’t. At least not a traditional one...Through years of user research and product development, we learned that&nbsp;people don’t want to spend more time sleeping.What people&nbsp;really&nbsp;want is to have more energy.It turns out that the biggest determinant of your energy levels is your sleep. However, the tools available today only address part of the problem. Some are trying to help you fall asleep (like Calm) and others aim to measure your sleep (like Fitbit, WHOOP, and Oura). None of these services are designed to help you feel better and have more energy. In fact, WHOOP’s recent peer-reviewed paper shows that while their tracker is accurate for measuring sleep it&nbsp;does not effectively improve sleep behavior. For people to feel better&nbsp;sleep tracking is necessary but not sufficient.RISE is not a sleep tracker.&nbsp;Our mission is to affect long-term behavior change to help people feel better and have more energy. After all, that is what people want. And to do that, you need to make the feedback loop between your sleep and your daily energy instant. We are not alone, the academic literature backs this up: BJ Fogg says that “it’s emotion that creates behavior, not repetition.” And this is why our company is called Rise&nbsp;Science. We couple peer-reviewed science with constant user feedback to guide our product development.It’s taken a decade of rigorous work and research to get here. We’ve invested millions of dollars (from the investors behind Peloton, Fitbit, Spotify, Facebook, and Twitter). We’ve studied tens of thousands of users – high schoolers to pro athletes, working parents to retirees - to design and build scientifically robust algorithms to help people live their best lives possible.If you want to see it for yourself,&nbsp;<a href="https://apps.apple.com/us/app/rise-track-sleep-circadian/id1453884781">start a free trial</a>.<h3>The work we do next will determine our success</h3>Our product works well, we have tens of thousands of happy customers and a scalable path to impact more people. We didn’t get lucky on product. We got here with a human-centered product team. But the work we do next, together, will ultimately determine how many lives we can improve and write the Rise Science story.<h2>A lot of the early hard work is done but there are some real challenges.</h2>While we’re not an established category with hundreds of thousands of paid subscribers, you’re not starting from scratch. We now need to take what we've done, scale it 100x, while continuously improve the experience for our future million subscribers. We need you to build a world-class platform and systems to get there.Now onto the challenges. I'll bullet them for you below.<ul>
<li>You'll be the first full-time person besides myself working on our backend and supporting our 2 (super talented) front-end engineers. If you crave autonomy, want to drive technical vision, and can think high-level but also drop down to implementation the details, you will have a blast here.</li>
<li>You would be working off an existing monolith and working on extending it and re-platforming where appropriate.</li>
<li>We have burning short-term scalability issues, but also an impactful product development roadmap ahead of us. If you can't work with our PM to balance short-term fixes with long-term priorities, it's probably not the right role.</li>
<li>You will have the autonomy of designing and implementing architectural changes to our infrastructure (with the help of a DevOps engineer). You'll have fun if you're comfortable thinking about bottlenecks, scalability, and ways to simplify designs.</li>
<li>We are a small team and rely heavily on each other but are also responsible for managing our own priorities. You will be expected to manage your workload and balance priorities to focus on the right thing at the right time.</li>
<li>Our primary focus is building a stellar user experience and that can lead to greater complexity, especially when it comes to server-client state management.&nbsp;If you have hands-on experience rethinking data flows and simplifying complexity then this might be the place for you.</li>
<li>We have many biomathematical and algorithmic models as part of production data paths. If you like thinking about domain modeling and designing data architectures beyond simple CRUD, this would be a good fit.</li>
</ul><h2>How you'll ramp up at Rise Science</h2>First Month<ul>
<li>Familiarize yourself with our product and how different systems power the end-user app experience. This will give you a sense of bottlenecks and opportunities to improve our product.</li>
<li>Implement performance improvements to our core data ingestion path.</li>
<li>Release a new set of APIs and background workers to support our new Smart Schedule feature.</li>
</ul>First 3 months<ul>
<li>You will lead the implementation of a new calculation that is part of the user-facing experience of our app.</li>
<li>You will lead the improvement of a key project to improve our sleep detection algorithms.</li>
<li>Implement APIs and calculations to support our new recommender system.</li>
<li>You will propose a plan to scale our systems 100x, in a way that can be broken down into stages, while halving user-facing loading times.</li>
<li>You will have audited and co-architected a plan to improve the way our mobile app syncs data with the backend, by working closely with our lead frontend engineer and CTO.</li>
<li>Re-architected our user-facing notification and reminders system to provide more reliability and reduce critical user-facing complaints with in-app notifications.</li>
</ul>6 months<ul>
<li>You will have shipped improvements to our client-side HealthKit data processing and ingestion system.</li>
<li>You will have integrated our subscription and billing management system with our App Store processor and Stripe to power new subscription offerings and referral systems.</li>
<li>You have implemented a trustworthy alerting system/on-call system on top of datadog and pagerduty and hitting the sweet spot of signal/noise of alarms.</li>
<li>You will have partnered with our Data Scientist to deploy improvements to all of our production algorithms.</li>
<li>You will have audited and standardized the way we use messaging and job queues to provide better observability, predictability and reliability to all of our functionality.</li>
</ul>So you're probably thinking, that's a quick pace. It is, and we don't expect you to be at full capacity in a month. But if you're the right fit, you'll start seeing success and you'll learn quickly. And if you're still convinced that this might be the right role, here are some reasons that we've found drive our existing team to do the best work of our careers.While we're not dogmatic about tools, we use a variety of different ones to power our product and company. Knowledge and experience in many of these will be handy, but it is not expected to have deep expertise in all of them.<ul>
<li>Python+Django for production web code as well as deep integrations with the numpy/pandas data stack.</li>
<li>Postgres as our main datastore. Firestore for syncing data to our mobile app and offline access.</li>
<li>Redis for caching and as a swiss-army for non-durable data needs.</li>
<li>Celery plus a home grown job-queue system on top of RabbitMQ</li>
<li>Cloudformation or Terraform to manage our AWS infrastructure.</li>
<li>ECS to run the majority of our backend systems.</li>
<li>Lambda for a few infinitely scalable entry points.</li>
<li>Datadog for logging and observability, powered by statsd.</li>
<li>Swift for our iOS client-side and data processing and algorithm layer.</li>
<li>React Native powers our core mobile app.</li>
</ul>Besides the tools, experience with certain types of project could come in handy:<ul>
<li>Scaling a backend from tens of thousands to millions of subscribers.</li>
<li>Scaling postgres and/or breaking out key data models into other, more suitable, datastores.</li>
<li>Working closely with data scientists or data engineers to launch production-ready user-facing experiences.</li>
<li>Working with legacy code and deciding which things not to fix.</li>
</ul><h2>Some reasons you might like working with us</h2><ul>
<li>You'll do work most days that will directly improve people's lives. The code you write and the systems you keep up will help more people become better at sleeping. Each PR, deploy, and performance improvement will have a direct impact on our users. Each member of the team shares this daily mission. What you do each day directly contributes to the health, happiness, productivity, and longevity of the world.</li>
<li>We don't chase shiny new technology. Most of the time, <a href="http://boringtechnology.club/">choosing boring technology is better.</a> But we aren't luddites. Occasionally, it makes sense to adopt new things quickly, like we did with React Native, Swift, ECS, and Lambda.</li>
<li>More than anything else, we realize <a href="http://paulgraham.com/vb.html">life is short</a>. So even though we're solving an unthinkably large problem, taking time for yourself and your family is essential. Without it, we don't believe you can live your best life and do your life's work. And of course, we'll get your sleep in order 😉</li>
<li>One of our core values is growth. That means every week, we'll talk about how we can help you grow. What skills, experiences, and people can help you get to your next career goal. For this role to be amazing, it has to be amazing for you.</li>
<li>You'll shape the long term direction and vision of our technology. Not just ship code, but own our direction and architecture. You will have the freedom to adopt technologies that you like.</li>
<li>You'll work alongside product, design, marketing and customer success. You'll have the opportunity to contribute meaningfully across the company (you'll be employee 9 or 10).</li>
<li>You won't have to convince anyone of the value of testing. We have extensive suites, but also know we have work to do here.</li>
</ul><h3>Compensation?</h3>We target 50th percentile for cash and 75th percentile for equity for companies of our size and capital raised. I'll share up to date market data with you so we're seeing the same data. We'll dig into specifics as soon as it's a clear fit on both sides.<h3>Location?</h3>US-friendly hours are strongly preferred. We’re a 100% distributed team (most in Eastern and Central time in the US) and we keep our meetings to an absolute minimum. However, we often work semi-synchronously so it’s important to have some solid workday overlap.<h2>If this sound interesting, let's talk.</h2>Instead of a cover letter, email me at <a href="mailto:leon@risescience.com">leon@risescience.com</a> | Subject: 'Rise Science Backend Lead' and include your answers to the questions below. We value great writing and clear thinking. So take the time you need but the answers don't need to be long. For guardrails, try not to spend more than an hour.<ol>
<li>Tell me why this opportunity feels right to you. What did you respond to in the letter? What surprised/excited you about the opportunity?</li>
<li>What would your most recent manager rate you 1-10? Why?</li>
<li>Can you tell me what you like about your current role? And what do you find drains your energy there?</li>
<li>Tell me about a time where you worked on a "brownfield" system. How did you balance the priorities of keeping the system running stably with moving things forward and allowing room for feature and new product development.</li>
<li>Tell me about a time that you hit scaling issues on a system you worked on: how did you approach solving it?</li>
<li>Have you ever undertaken a big refactor? What was the thought process behind the decision and how did it ultimately pan out?</li>
<li>Imagine you were to start a new work project that has a pretty standard web JSON API, database and also has considerable amount of background workers. Which technologies would you choose, and how would you set everything up as a high-level?</li>
<li>What's your perspective about unit testing and integration tests? How do you apply this perspective at your current role? If it were up to you, what would you change about how and what you test at your current job?</li>
</ol>What to expect nextI'll hand review what you send. I'll respond with either "I don't think the fit is here" or
that we should move forward in process. To make sure this is an amazing fit for you here's what the rest of process looks like assuming there's some fit:












































<ol>
<li>
We talk on the phone for 30 minutes and I ask questions about your past work and how it relates to what you'd be doing at Rise Science.
</li>
<li>
A take-home realistic challenge that should take you no more than 5 hours. This is designed to be similar in nature to the work we do here at Rise Science.
</li>
<li>
A deep dive with a few of your potential future team members. Both on technical areas and non-technical areas. It would be 3-4 sessions over zoom. For example: remote pair with our front-end lead on an expansion of the take-home challenge, and spending some time with our CEO talking about company culture and product development believes.
</li>
</ol>

We're hiring someone to lead our backend engineering. The purpose of this
letter is to help you decide if this role is right for you. And if it turns
out this is a fit, my claim is that you will be hard-pressed to find something
more meaningful and impactful for your life and career.

It will take you some time to read through, but if you do, you should learn
something new, have a clear sense of what we're working on, and know if you'll
thrive in our current environment. You won't find traditional requirements.
Mostly because this isn't a traditional role. For the right person, this could
be a once-in-lifetime chance to do something that matters and propel your
personal growth.

Thanks in advance for reading and sleep well,

Leon

Co-founder, CTO @ Rise Science

* * *

## What are we working on at Rise Science?

The short answer: we're building a sleep app for everyday people that helps
you be less tired and get more out of your day. Sleep is the most potent
performance enhancing drug there is. It's the foundation of literally
everything we can measure about you. And it's your nights that dictate your
days.

Read about how we got started: [Our founders' journey to sleep and its
importance](https://www.notion.so/Founder-
Story-c65ae47f62014c4ba6ebdf02280d4c0b).

You might ask “Does the world need another sleep app?” The answer is, no, it
doesn’t. At least not a traditional one...

Through years of user research and product development, we learned that
**people don’t want to spend more time sleeping.**

What people  _really_  want is to have more energy.

It turns out that the biggest determinant of your energy levels is your sleep.
However, the tools available today only address part of the problem. Some are
trying to help you fall asleep (like Calm) and others aim to measure your
sleep (like Fitbit, WHOOP, and Oura). None of these services are designed to
help you feel better and have more energy. In fact, WHOOP’s recent peer-
reviewed paper shows that while their tracker is accurate for measuring sleep
it  **does not effectively improve sleep behavior**. For people to feel better
_sleep tracking is necessary but not sufficient_.

 **RISE is not a sleep tracker.**  Our mission is to affect long-term behavior
change to help people feel better and have more energy. After all, that is
what people want. And to do that, you need to make the feedback loop between
your sleep and your daily energy instant. We are not alone, the academic
literature backs this up: BJ Fogg says that “it’s emotion that creates
behavior, not repetition.” And this is why our company is called Rise
_Science_. We couple peer-reviewed science with constant user feedback to
guide our product development.

It’s taken a decade of rigorous work and research to get here. We’ve invested
millions of dollars (from the investors behind Peloton, Fitbit, Spotify,
Facebook, and Twitter). We’ve studied tens of thousands of users – high
schoolers to pro athletes, working parents to retirees - to design and build
scientifically robust algorithms to help people live their best lives
possible.

If you want to see it for yourself, [start a free
trial](https://apps.apple.com/us/app/rise-track-sleep-circadian/id1453884781).

### The work we do next will determine our success

Our product works well, we have tens of thousands of happy customers and a
scalable path to impact more people. We didn’t get lucky on product. We got
here with a human-centered product team. But **the work we do next** ,
together, will ultimately determine how many lives we can improve and write
the Rise Science story.

## A lot of the early hard work is done but there are some real challenges.

While we’re not an established category with hundreds of thousands of paid
subscribers, you’re not starting from scratch. We now need to take what we've
done, scale it 100x, while continuously improve the experience for our future
million subscribers. We need you to build a world-class platform and systems
to get there.

Now onto the challenges. I'll bullet them for you below.

  * You'll be the first full-time person besides myself working on our backend and supporting our 2 (super talented) front-end engineers. _If you crave autonomy, want to drive technical vision, and can think high-level but also drop down to implementation the details, you will have a blast here._
  * You would be working off an existing monolith and working on extending it and re-platforming where appropriate.
  * We have burning short-term scalability issues, but also an impactful product development roadmap ahead of us. _If you can't work with our PM to balance short-term fixes with long-term priorities, it's probably not the right role._
  * You will have the autonomy of designing and implementing architectural changes to our infrastructure (with the help of a DevOps engineer). _You'll have fun if you're comfortable thinking about bottlenecks, scalability, and ways to simplify designs._
  * We are a small team and rely heavily on each other but are also responsible for managing our own priorities. _You will be expected to manage your workload and balance priorities to focus on the right thing at the right time._
  * Our primary focus is building a stellar user experience and that can lead to greater complexity, especially when it comes to server-client state management.  _If you have hands-on experience rethinking data flows and simplifying complexity then this might be the place for you._
  * We have many biomathematical and algorithmic models as part of production data paths. _If you like thinking about domain modeling and designing data architectures beyond simple CRUD, this would be a good fit._

## How you'll ramp up at Rise Science

 **First Month**

  * Familiarize yourself with our product and how different systems power the end-user app experience. This will give you a sense of bottlenecks and opportunities to improve our product.
  * Implement performance improvements to our core data ingestion path.
  * Release a new set of APIs and background workers to support our new Smart Schedule feature.

**First 3 months**

  * You will lead the implementation of a new calculation that is part of the user-facing experience of our app.
  * You will lead the improvement of a key project to improve our sleep detection algorithms.
  * Implement APIs and calculations to support our new recommender system.
  * You will propose a plan to scale our systems 100x, in a way that can be broken down into stages, while halving user-facing loading times.
  * You will have audited and co-architected a plan to improve the way our mobile app syncs data with the backend, by working closely with our lead frontend engineer and CTO.
  * Re-architected our user-facing notification and reminders system to provide more reliability and reduce critical user-facing complaints with in-app notifications.

**6 months**

  * You will have shipped improvements to our client-side HealthKit data processing and ingestion system.
  * You will have integrated our subscription and billing management system with our App Store processor and Stripe to power new subscription offerings and referral systems.
  * You have implemented a trustworthy alerting system/on-call system on top of datadog and pagerduty and hitting the sweet spot of signal/noise of alarms.
  * You will have partnered with our Data Scientist to deploy improvements to all of our production algorithms.
  * You will have audited and standardized the way we use messaging and job queues to provide better observability, predictability and reliability to all of our functionality.

So you're probably thinking, that's a quick pace. It is, and we don't expect
you to be at full capacity in a month. But if you're the right fit, you'll
start seeing success and you'll learn quickly. And if you're still convinced
that this might be the right role, here are some reasons that we've found
drive our existing team to do the best work of our careers.

While we're not dogmatic about tools, we use a variety of different ones to
power our product and company. Knowledge and experience in many of these will
be handy, but it is not expected to have deep expertise in all of them.

  * Python+Django for production web code as well as deep integrations with the numpy/pandas data stack.
  * Postgres as our main datastore. Firestore for syncing data to our mobile app and offline access.
  * Redis for caching and as a swiss-army for non-durable data needs.
  * Celery plus a home grown job-queue system on top of RabbitMQ
  * Cloudformation or Terraform to manage our AWS infrastructure.
  * ECS to run the majority of our backend systems.
  * Lambda for a few infinitely scalable entry points.
  * Datadog for logging and observability, powered by statsd.
  * Swift for our iOS client-side and data processing and algorithm layer.
  * React Native powers our core mobile app.

Besides the tools, experience with certain types of project could come in
handy:

  * Scaling a backend from tens of thousands to millions of subscribers.
  * Scaling postgres and/or breaking out key data models into other, more suitable, datastores.
  * Working closely with data scientists or data engineers to launch production-ready user-facing experiences.
  * Working with legacy code and deciding which things _not to fix._

## Some reasons you might like working with us

  * **You'll do work most days that will directly improve people's lives**. The code you write and the systems you keep up will help more people become better at sleeping. Each PR, deploy, and performance improvement will have a direct impact on our users. Each member of the team shares this daily mission. What you do each day directly contributes to the health, happiness, productivity, and longevity of the world.
  * We don't chase shiny new technology. Most of the time, [choosing boring technology is better.](http://boringtechnology.club/) But we aren't luddites. Occasionally, it makes sense to adopt new things quickly, like we did with React Native, Swift, ECS, and Lambda.
  * More than anything else, we realize [life is short](http://paulgraham.com/vb.html). So even though we're solving an unthinkably large problem, **taking time for yourself and your family is essential**. Without it, we don't believe you can live your best life and do your life's work. And of course, we'll get your sleep in order 😉
  * One of our core values is growth. That means every week, we'll talk about how we can help you grow. What skills, experiences, and people can **help you get to your next career goal**. For this role to be amazing, it has to be amazing for you.
  * You'll shape the long term direction and vision of our technology. Not just ship code, but own our direction and architecture. You will have the freedom to adopt technologies that you like.
  * You'll work alongside product, design, marketing and customer success. You'll have the opportunity to contribute meaningfully across the company (you'll be employee 9 or 10).
  * You won't have to convince anyone of the value of testing. We have extensive suites, but also know we have work to do here.

### Compensation?

We target 50th percentile for cash and 75th percentile for equity for
companies of our size and capital raised. I'll share up to date market data
with you so we're seeing the same data. We'll dig into specifics as soon as
it's a clear fit on both sides.

### Location?

US-friendly hours are strongly preferred. We’re a 100% distributed team (most
in Eastern and Central time in the US) and we keep our meetings to an absolute
minimum. However, we often work semi-synchronously so it’s important to have
some solid workday overlap.

## If this sound interesting, let's talk.

Instead of a cover letter, email me at
**[leon@risescience.com](mailto:leon@risescience.com)** | Subject: ' **Rise
Science Backend Lead** ' and include your answers to the questions below. We
value great writing and clear thinking. So take the time you need but the
answers don't need to be long. For guardrails, try not to spend more than an
hour.

  1. Tell me why this opportunity feels right to you. What did you respond to in the letter? What surprised/excited you about the opportunity?
  2. What would your most recent manager rate you 1-10? Why?
  3. Can you tell me what you like about your current role? And what do you find drains your energy there?
  4. Tell me about a time where you worked on a "brownfield" system. How did you balance the priorities of keeping the system running stably with moving things forward and allowing room for feature and new product development.
  5. Tell me about a time that you hit scaling issues on a system you worked on: how did you approach solving it?
  6. Have you ever undertaken a big refactor? What was the thought process behind the decision and how did it ultimately pan out?
  7. Imagine you were to start a new work project that has a pretty standard web JSON API, database and also has considerable amount of background workers. Which technologies would you choose, and how would you set everything up as a high-level?
  8. What's your perspective about unit testing and integration tests? How do you apply this perspective at your current role? If it were up to you, what would you change about how and what you test at your current job?

**What to expect next**

I'll hand review what you send. I'll respond with either "I don't think the
fit is here" or that we should move forward in process. To make sure this is
an amazing fit for you here's what the rest of process looks like assuming
there's some fit:

  1. We talk on the phone for 30 minutes and I ask questions about your past work and how it relates to what you'd be doing at Rise Science.

  2. A take-home realistic challenge that should take you no more than 5 hours. This is designed to be similar in nature to the work we do here at Rise Science.

  3. A deep dive with a few of your potential future team members. Both on technical areas and non-technical areas. It would be 3-4 sessions over zoom. For example: remote pair with our front-end lead on an expansion of the take-home challenge, and spending some time with our CEO talking about company culture and product development believes.

