<p>We're hiring a React Native Engineer—focused on building our mobile app. I wrote this letter to help you decide if this is the right opportunity for you. In it, I share what you need to be successful, what success looks like, and challenges you're likely to face.</p><p>If it turns out this is a fit, I believe that you will be hard-pressed to find something more meaningful and impactful for your life and career.</p><p>It will take you 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 and we're not looking for a traditional person.</p><p>For the right person, this could be a once-in-lifetime chance to do something that matters and propels your personal growth.</p><p>Thanks in advance for reading and sleep well,</p><p>Caleb
Lead Product Engineer @ Rise Science</p><hr><h2>What are we working on at Rise Science?</h2><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>Read about how we got started: <a href="https://www.notion.so/Founder-Story-c65ae47f62014c4ba6ebdf02280d4c0b">Our founders' journey to sleep and its importance</a>.</p><p>You might ask “Does the world need another sleep app?” The answer is, no, it doesn’t. At least not a traditional one...</p><p>Through years of user research and product development, we learned that&nbsp;<strong>people don’t want to spend more time sleeping.</strong></p><p>What people&nbsp;<em>really</em>&nbsp;want is to have more energy.</p><p>It turns out 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, &amp; 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;<strong>does not effectively improve sleep behavior</strong>.</p><p>For people to feel better&nbsp;<em>sleep tracking is necessary but not sufficient</em>.</p><p><strong>RISE is not a sleep tracker.</strong>&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;<em>Science</em>. We couple peer-reviewed science with constant user feedback to guide our product development.</p><p>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 the best lives possible.</p><p>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>.</p><h2>The work we do next will determine our success</h2><p>While we’re not an established category with hundreds of thousands of paid subscribers, you’re not starting from scratch. 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 <strong>the work we do next</strong>, together, will ultimately determine how many lives we can improve and write the Rise Science story.</p><h3>Some challenges of working at Rise Science</h3><ul>
<li>You'll be our second React Native engineer and will have a lot of autonomy. <em>You should like working on small teams and having a lot of responsibility.</em></li>
<li>You've got to be comfortable with ambiguity. <em>We don't have all the answers and we aren't always right—you're allowed to be wrong at Rise Science. You'll have to be comfortable with discovering the answer.</em></li>
<li>We iterate quickly and often. <em>There are times when an experiment doesn't work. You've got to be okay throwing out a feature you spent a week building––we really try to avoid that though!</em></li>
<li>Our primary focus is building a stellar user experience and that can lead to greater complexity. Our app has grown quickly and, as a result, the state management has become complex.&nbsp;<em>If you have hands-on experience rethinking data flows and simplifying complexity then this might be the place for you.</em></li>
<li>You will be working in a codebase that is mid-migration to Typescript.&nbsp;<em>If you’re able to write clean code in a transitioning environment and can improve adjacent code, then this could be a good fit.</em></li>
<li>We are building a product together. Product, design, engineering all sit at the same table and we are all listening to the user.&nbsp;<em>If you like being on an integrated team and like actively collaborating with other disciplines, then there’s a good chance you’ll be happy here.</em></li>
<li>We are a small team and rely heavily on each other but are also responsible for managing our own priorities. <em>You will be expected to manage your workload and balance priorities to focus on the right thing at the right time.</em></li>
</ul><h2>What your days at Rise Science will look like and what success looks like:</h2><p>Success is building a world-class user experience while focusing on prioritizing product needs, and maintaining a rapid iteration pace and a clean code base.</p><p>You'll be responsible for working directly with the rest of the product team on building complex user flows, interactive features, and helping to improve developer ergonomics and front end infrastructure. You should have passion and skills in these areas:</p><ul>
<li>Shipping features that help users connect their problem to the value of a product.</li>
<li>Implementing A/B + multivariate experiments.</li>
<li>Writing and backfilling unit and e2e tests.</li>
<li>Giving and receiving code reviews.</li>
<li>Comfortably digging into analytics and crash reports to troubleshoot and fix bugs.</li>
<li>Balancing development speed and code quality - avoiding cowboy code and over-engineering.</li>
</ul><h3>Within 1 month, you will...</h3><ul>
<li>Familiarize yourself with our product and how different systems work together (mobile app, back end, etc) to power the user experience.</li>
<li>Improve typing on legacy code that we are migrating to Typescript.</li>
<li>Implement and ship your first A/B test in the core onboarding flow.</li>
</ul><h3>Within 3 months, you will...</h3><ul>
<li>Design and implement a performance monitoring dashboard (in Datadog) and wire up the important events to it.</li>
<li>Design and implement reliable e2e and integration tests that are wired into our CI workflow</li>
<li>Redesign and build the user subscription management system in the mobile app.</li>
<li>Lead the development of multiple user-facing features.</li>
</ul><h3>Within 6 months, you will...</h3><ul>
<li>Have audited and co-architected a plan to improve the way the mobile app manages its state (currently using React Context and hooks).</li>
<li>Implemented an Over-the-Air updates system.</li>
<li>Ensured the vast majority of the codebase is fully typed.</li>
<li>Ensured we have e2e tests for all the critical paths in our app.</li>
</ul><h3>Our tech stack looks like this:</h3><ul>
<li>React Native for the iOS/Android apps.</li>
<li>Apple Watch and iOS Widget written in Swift.</li>
<li>All new code is in Typescript and we are mid-process of typing the older code.</li>
<li>Custom native modules written in Swift/Kotlin that handle sleep data collection and processing.</li>
<li>A REST api written in Python+Django.</li>
<li>Firebase for data syncing and offline support.</li>
<li>React Context and hooks for state management.</li>
<li>Jest for unit tests and Detox for e2e tests.</li>
<li>We build our app to TestFlight via CI/CD with Fastlane in CircleCI.</li>
<li>RN Animation &amp; Reanimated for animations.</li>
</ul><p>While not necessary, experience with related technologies would be helpful:</p><ul>
<li>Working with Swift and/or Kotlin to write custom native integrations for React Native</li>
<li>Python for understanding and interacting with the backend.</li>
</ul><p>I know this looks like a lot. It is, and I 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.</p><h2>Some reasons you might like working with us</h2><ul>
<li><strong>You'll do work most days that will directly improve people's lives</strong>. What you do each day directly contributes to the health, happiness, productivity, and longevity of the world. Each PR, bug fix, and performance improvement will have a direct impact on our users. Each member of the team shares this daily mission.</li>
<li>You'll work with a <strong>team that cares about the full customer experience</strong>. We're not product-first or acquisition-first or outcomes-first, we're led by our customers' needs and that means we need to be thoughtful about the entire journey our customers go through. Here's a <a href="https://www.notion.so/risescience/Rise-Team-Values-How-we-do-great-work-as-a-team-5e6bfd3dd9a14632ad659b499f0a1caf">link to our values</a> that support quality work getting done. I'd encourage you to read them as they're a direct window into what your future team members care about.</li>
<li>More than anything else, we realize that <a href="http://paulgraham.com/vb.html">life is short</a>. So even though we're solving an unthinkably large problem, <strong>taking time for yourself and your family is essential</strong>. Without it, we don't believe you can live your best life and do your life's work. And of course, we're built on low sleep debt 😉</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 <strong>help you get to your next career goal</strong>. For this role to be amazing, it has to be amazing for you.</li>
<li>You will have a&nbsp;<strong>strong voice</strong>&nbsp;in what we build and how. You’ll play a key role in working with design to figure out what we can build in the time we have available and establish the scope of work.</li>
<li>You value&nbsp;<strong>progress over perfection</strong>. Don’t get me wrong, we need a solid app, but our goal is to have a life-changing product, not a pretty code base.</li>
<li>We are a fast-moving startup and we have a lot of work to do, but&nbsp;<strong>we are humans and put humans first</strong>. There is no “hero cult". No one will ask you to work late. No one will ask you to work on the weekend. We support and encourage each other to take time off.</li>
<li>You'll also have a front row seat to all the ups and downs of building a company (you'll be one of the first 10 employees).</li>
</ul><h3>Compensation?</h3><p>We target 50th percentile for cash and 75th percentile for equity for companies of our size and capital raised.  We will 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.</p><h3>Location?</h3><p>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.</p><h2>If this sounds interesting, let's talk.</h2><p>Instead of a cover letter, <strong>email me at <a href="mailto:caleb@risescience.com">caleb@risescience.com</a> | Subject: 'Rise Science React Native Engineer' and include your answers to the questions below</strong>. We value great writing and clear thinking. We also value your time. Take the time you need, but apply the constraint of about an hour, not more.</p><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>Have you ever undertaken a big refactor? What was the thought process behind the decision and how did it ultimately pan out?</li>
<li>What’s your perspective on unit testing and integration tests? How do you apply this perspective in your current role? If it were up to you, what would you change about how and what you test at your current job?</li>
<li>In your opinion, what are some of the challenges of state management, particularly in React Native mobile apps? Can you tell us about any libraries or approaches you like using?</li>
<li>When building complex &amp; dynamic UI Animations what are some of the common pitfalls that can make it difficult to keep them smooth and jank-free?</li>
<li>What do you think is the ideal workflow to manage A/B tests so that code doesn’t sprawl and leave dozens of feature flags all over the place?</li>
<li>What would you like to do differently, or how would you like to grow most in your next role?</li>
<li>Tell me about a time when you had a design or interaction that wasn’t feasible with the resources available (time, budget, etc) and what you did to address it.</li>
<li>Why are you an engineer?</li>
</ol><h2>What to expect next</h2><p>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 with the process. If we move forward, here's what the rest of the process looks like. The goal is to learn together if this is an amazing fit for you .</p><p>
















































</p><ol>
<li>Interview: We meet over Zoom and cover some basics, then focus our conversation on questions about your past work and how it relates to what you’d be doing at Rise Science.</li>
<li>Work Review: You've read the job letter and what we need you to do. During this conversation I'll ask you to walk through, in detail, how you've done this in a past job. I may invite a few team members to join.</li>
<li>Work Simulation: We'll send over a take-home challenge that will let us simulate working together. This is designed to be similar to the type of work we do here at Rise Science. This stage should take no more than 5 hours, and we'll both have a clear sense of how we work together by the end.</li>
<li>Team Talks: At this stage we're incredibly excited about your potential with Rise Science, and it's time to get to know the team you'd be working with. You'll find time with 1-4 of your potential future team members. You will also spend time with our CTO and CEO talking about how Rise Science can support you on your personal journey.</li>
</ol>

We're hiring a React Native Engineer—focused on building our mobile app. I
wrote this letter to help you decide if this is the right opportunity for you.
In it, I share what you need to be successful, what success looks like, and
challenges you're likely to face.

If it turns out this is a fit, I believe that you will be hard-pressed to find
something more meaningful and impactful for your life and career.

It will take you 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 and we're not looking for a
traditional person.

For the right person, this could be a once-in-lifetime chance to do something
that matters and propels your personal growth.

Thanks in advance for reading and sleep well,

Caleb Lead Product Engineer @ 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 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, & 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 the 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

While we’re not an established category with hundreds of thousands of paid
subscribers, you’re not starting from scratch. 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.

### Some challenges of working at Rise Science

  * You'll be our second React Native engineer and will have a lot of autonomy. _You should like working on small teams and having a lot of responsibility._
  * You've got to be comfortable with ambiguity. _We don't have all the answers and we aren't always right—you're allowed to be wrong at Rise Science. You'll have to be comfortable with discovering the answer._
  * We iterate quickly and often. _There are times when an experiment doesn't work. You've got to be okay throwing out a feature you spent a week building––we really try to avoid that though!_
  * Our primary focus is building a stellar user experience and that can lead to greater complexity. Our app has grown quickly and, as a result, the state management has become complex.  _If you have hands-on experience rethinking data flows and simplifying complexity then this might be the place for you._
  * You will be working in a codebase that is mid-migration to Typescript.  _If you’re able to write clean code in a transitioning environment and can improve adjacent code, then this could be a good fit._
  * We are building a product together. Product, design, engineering all sit at the same table and we are all listening to the user.  _If you like being on an integrated team and like actively collaborating with other disciplines, then there’s a good chance you’ll be happy here._
  * 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._

## What your days at Rise Science will look like and what success looks like:

Success is building a world-class user experience while focusing on
prioritizing product needs, and maintaining a rapid iteration pace and a clean
code base.

You'll be responsible for working directly with the rest of the product team
on building complex user flows, interactive features, and helping to improve
developer ergonomics and front end infrastructure. You should have passion and
skills in these areas:

  * Shipping features that help users connect their problem to the value of a product.
  * Implementing A/B + multivariate experiments.
  * Writing and backfilling unit and e2e tests.
  * Giving and receiving code reviews.
  * Comfortably digging into analytics and crash reports to troubleshoot and fix bugs.
  * Balancing development speed and code quality - avoiding cowboy code and over-engineering.

### Within 1 month, you will...

  * Familiarize yourself with our product and how different systems work together (mobile app, back end, etc) to power the user experience.
  * Improve typing on legacy code that we are migrating to Typescript.
  * Implement and ship your first A/B test in the core onboarding flow.

### Within 3 months, you will...

  * Design and implement a performance monitoring dashboard (in Datadog) and wire up the important events to it.
  * Design and implement reliable e2e and integration tests that are wired into our CI workflow
  * Redesign and build the user subscription management system in the mobile app.
  * Lead the development of multiple user-facing features.

### Within 6 months, you will...

  * Have audited and co-architected a plan to improve the way the mobile app manages its state (currently using React Context and hooks).
  * Implemented an Over-the-Air updates system.
  * Ensured the vast majority of the codebase is fully typed.
  * Ensured we have e2e tests for all the critical paths in our app.

### Our tech stack looks like this:

  * React Native for the iOS/Android apps.
  * Apple Watch and iOS Widget written in Swift.
  * All new code is in Typescript and we are mid-process of typing the older code.
  * Custom native modules written in Swift/Kotlin that handle sleep data collection and processing.
  * A REST api written in Python+Django.
  * Firebase for data syncing and offline support.
  * React Context and hooks for state management.
  * Jest for unit tests and Detox for e2e tests.
  * We build our app to TestFlight via CI/CD with Fastlane in CircleCI.
  * RN Animation & Reanimated for animations.

While not necessary, experience with related technologies would be helpful:

  * Working with Swift and/or Kotlin to write custom native integrations for React Native
  * Python for understanding and interacting with the backend.

I know this looks like a lot. It is, and I 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.

## Some reasons you might like working with us

  * **You'll do work most days that will directly improve people's lives**. What you do each day directly contributes to the health, happiness, productivity, and longevity of the world. Each PR, bug fix, and performance improvement will have a direct impact on our users. Each member of the team shares this daily mission.
  * You'll work with a **team that cares about the full customer experience**. We're not product-first or acquisition-first or outcomes-first, we're led by our customers' needs and that means we need to be thoughtful about the entire journey our customers go through. Here's a [link to our values](https://www.notion.so/risescience/Rise-Team-Values-How-we-do-great-work-as-a-team-5e6bfd3dd9a14632ad659b499f0a1caf) that support quality work getting done. I'd encourage you to read them as they're a direct window into what your future team members care about.
  * More than anything else, we realize that [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're built on low sleep debt 😉
  * 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 will have a  **strong voice**  in what we build and how. You’ll play a key role in working with design to figure out what we can build in the time we have available and establish the scope of work.
  * You value  **progress over perfection**. Don’t get me wrong, we need a solid app, but our goal is to have a life-changing product, not a pretty code base.
  * We are a fast-moving startup and we have a lot of work to do, but  **we are humans and put humans first**. There is no “hero cult". No one will ask you to work late. No one will ask you to work on the weekend. We support and encourage each other to take time off.
  * You'll also have a front row seat to all the ups and downs of building a company (you'll be one of the first 10 employees).

### Compensation?

We target 50th percentile for cash and 75th percentile for equity for
companies of our size and capital raised. We will 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 sounds interesting, let's talk.

Instead of a cover letter, **email me
at[caleb@risescience.com](mailto:caleb@risescience.com) | Subject: 'Rise
Science React Native Engineer' and include your answers to the questions
below**. We value great writing and clear thinking. We also value your time.
Take the time you need, but apply the constraint of about an hour, not more.

  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. Have you ever undertaken a big refactor? What was the thought process behind the decision and how did it ultimately pan out?
  4. What’s your perspective on unit testing and integration tests? How do you apply this perspective in your current role? If it were up to you, what would you change about how and what you test at your current job?
  5. In your opinion, what are some of the challenges of state management, particularly in React Native mobile apps? Can you tell us about any libraries or approaches you like using?
  6. When building complex & dynamic UI Animations what are some of the common pitfalls that can make it difficult to keep them smooth and jank-free?
  7. What do you think is the ideal workflow to manage A/B tests so that code doesn’t sprawl and leave dozens of feature flags all over the place?
  8. What would you like to do differently, or how would you like to grow most in your next role?
  9. Tell me about a time when you had a design or interaction that wasn’t feasible with the resources available (time, budget, etc) and what you did to address it.
  10. Why are you an engineer?

## 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 with the process. If we move
forward, here's what the rest of the process looks like. The goal is to learn
together if this is an amazing fit for you .

  1. Interview: We meet over Zoom and cover some basics, then focus our conversation on questions about your past work and how it relates to what you’d be doing at Rise Science.
  2. Work Review: You've read the job letter and what we need you to do. During this conversation I'll ask you to walk through, in detail, how you've done this in a past job. I may invite a few team members to join.
  3. Work Simulation: We'll send over a take-home challenge that will let us simulate working together. This is designed to be similar to the type of work we do here at Rise Science. This stage should take no more than 5 hours, and we'll both have a clear sense of how we work together by the end.
  4. Team Talks: At this stage we're incredibly excited about your potential with Rise Science, and it's time to get to know the team you'd be working with. You'll find time with 1-4 of your potential future team members. You will also spend time with our CTO and CEO talking about how Rise Science can support you on your personal journey.

