Senior Backend Software Engineer
About Common
Common is the nation’s leading residential brand offering convenience and community through coliving and traditional apartments. Our signature tech-enabled property management allows us to deliver unparalleled experiences across 40+ buildings, 8 cities, and over 1,500 members. Common is the preferred choice for both residents looking for a stress-free and all-inclusive living environment, and for real estate owners seeking reliable, above-market returns. Launched in October 2015, we now operate homes in New York City, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Oakland, Seattle, Philadelphia and Washington, D.C. and receive over 15,000 new member applications per month.
It’s an exciting time to be part of Common’s team. We challenge ourselves every day not just to think about ways to make city living better, but to activate those ideas in meaningful ways. Our team is comprised of real estate professionals, designers, engineers, salespeople, marketers, client service representatives, and so much more. We work collaboratively, value self-startership, and embrace a “whatever it takes” mentality to ensure our work is done and done well. Common sits squarely at the intersection between technology and real estate, working every day to build quality residential solutions that bring positive change to the world’s rental housing crisis.
Common was founded by Brad Hargreaves and has raised $65MM in venture funding. Brad is a visionary leader with vast experience in the technology and service space, previously founding the education company General Assembly.
To follow the latest Common news, get to know our community of residents, and learn about what it’s like to work at Common, you can follow us on Instagram, Linkedin, and Twitter. To see more open roles and hear from Common employees check out our Careers Page.
About the Role
Common is seeking a Senior Backend Software Engineer who is excited about building the future of city living and developing a best in class experience for our tenants. You will develop solutions to complex problems in a highly regulated industry through extensible, maintainable, and robust services. Your previous experiences will help influence our technical architecture, development strategy, processes, and methodologies. Our current digital product charter is to build software to support the next 100,000 tenants living in Common. We still have work to do and you will have an important say in how we develop our core platform.
The ideal candidate is highly technical and has a background developing core services and API’s. You believe clear is better than clever, lack ego, love teaching, and have a history of shipping high quality and intuitive solutions. You believe in taking calculated risks and bringing data to the conversation. You are excited about rethinking the rental and tenant experience and already have ideas for how to make it better.
Responsibilities
- Architect and develop backend features, services, and API’s on our core platform
- Influence the long term-term architecture and technical direction of our platform
- Write well tested maintainable code while continuously delivering value to the business
- Be responsible for the lifecycle of a project from drafting a technical specification, to releasing in production, and everything in-between
- Participate in internal engineering talks, mentorship, interviewing, and stewarding our technical standards
- Help shepherd and iterate on our engineering culture and values
- Provide peer feedback on pull requests, technical specifications, and implementation strategies
Qualifications + Requirements
- 7+ years of software engineering experience
- A degree in computer science is preferred but not required. However, you should have a strong grasp of CS fundamentals.
- Advanced knowledge of multiple object oriented or scripting languages
- Experience designing complex database schemas and writing raw SQL
- High emotional intelligence, empathy, self-awareness, and optimism
- Experience writing unit, integration, and end-to-end tests
- Understanding of programming patterns and software development principles
- Familiarity with domain-driven design
- Strong communicator, collaborator, and relationship builder
- Bonus: Experience with Ruby, Ruby on Rails, PostgreSQL, GraphQL, AWS, or Heroku
What We Offer
Common truly values our employees and wants to do everything to ensure that our employees are not only happy and professionally fulfilled, but also that they have the opportunity to be healthy. Because of this, we are committed to providing a number of affordable and valuable health and wellness benefits for our employees such as paid vacation and sick time, medical, dental and vision insurance, Company paid life insurance, Company paid STD/LTD Insurance, FSA + HSA options, commuter transit benefits, generous paid parental leave (up to 16 weeks!) and a 401K. Additional benefits such as Company equity, paid holidays, weekly team lunches + weekly happy hours, a fully stocked kitchen, flexible working hours, job training + development opportunities + a great wellness program are also available. And as always, we are regularly evaluating our offerings to ensure employees needs are being met.
We are committed to affirmatively providing equal opportunity to all associates and qualified applicants without regard to race, color, ancestry, national origin, religion, sex, marital status, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, legally protected physical or mental disability, military or veteran status or any other basis protected under applicable federal or state law.