[Job] Full Stack Engineer at Effektiv Spenden

By Sebastian Becker, Sebastian Schwiecker @ 2023-05-16T14:34 (+16)

Cross post from Effektiv Spenden.

[Update: Applications are now closed]

Role Title

Full Stack Engineer

Local/Remote

Preference for candidates who can work from our office in Berlin, but open to remote work within +/- 3 hours of the Berlin timezone.

Please let our preference for candidates able to work from Berlin not put you off from applying if you prefer to work remotely. We will definitely consider candidates who can only work remotely.

Part-time or full time

Full time (40 hours/week)

Salary range

€50,000 – €75,000

Do I need to speak German?

No. Bonus if you can, but it is not a requirement.

About Effektiv Spenden

Effektiv Spenden is Germany’s most impactful donation platform. Since we’ve launched in 2019, we have raised over 40 million Euros for the most effective charities in global health and development, animal welfare, climate change and catastrophic global risks prevention. In terms of donation volume, we’re already the second biggest donation platform in Germany and our ambition is to raise 100 million Euros per year by 2025. Our vision is to make effective giving the norm in the German-speaking world.

We have been recognised for our impact many times: We are a Giving What We Can top-rated charity and a Founders Pledge recommended charity. We have been awarded a grant over €2.18 million Euros by Open Philanthropy.

Your role

You will mostly work on features that cover the full stack of our donation web app. Working on a feature will include gathering requirements from the product team, planning your work and implementation. 

Examples of features we have been working on recently:

• Donation vouchers: Users can buy donation vouchers that others can then redeem to make a donation to an impactful organization of their choice.
• Matching pledges: Donors that select a monthly recurring donation pledge get their first donation matched by us.
• Automating our regranting process: Saving our ops team’s time by writing code that breaks down how much money we allocate each quarter to the charities we work with. 

You will be collaborating mostly with our Senior Full Stack Engineer Sebastian Becker on the tech side and with our CEO Basti Schwiecker on the product side.

Our Tech Stack

• Donation web app
  • Ruby on Rails
  • VueJS
  • PostgreSQL database
  • AWS (RDS, S3), heroku
• Website: WordPress
• Data analytics: AWS Quicksight, Google Analytics

Why is this role important?

We have ambitious plans to grow and want to develop and test out new features at a quicker pace than we do at the moment. We are currently only making up 0.1% of the German-speaking donation market and believe that there is much more potential for us. We have raised over 15 million Euros in 2022 and aim to raise 30 million this year and 100 million in 2025. Providing technical solutions that are at the forefront in the German-speaking market is an integral part of our strategy for this.

Some of our plans

To reach these goals, we are considering testing out features like the following:

• Offer existing donors to manage their donations through a donor portal to decrease operational costs for us and increase retention by improving joy of use.
• Better integrate our donation app with our CRM to make it easier for our donation advisers to help donors with their donation decisions.
• Implement A/B testing to gather more insight on which features deliver the most value.
• Expand our current offer from Germany and Switzerland to Austria, a donation market worth 700 million Euros.
• Offer individual fundraising pages so that donors can raise money for organizations from their personal networks.
• Explore the possibilities of generative AI for our offers.

Should I apply?

Technical fit

You will be a good fit if you have previously worked in a small cross-functional team where you had the responsibility to deliver features within a stack similar to ours. Similar technology would be:

• Rails: Django, Express/Node, Spring Boot, ASP.Net Core MVC, or other MVC web frameworks.
• Vue: React, Angular or other JS frameworks.
• PostgreSQL: MySQL, MariaDB, Microsoft SQLServer or other relational databases.
• AWS: Azure, GCP or other cloud service providers.

Experience with WordPress or our Data Analytics tools is a bonus, but not required.

Also, if you don’t know, for example, Ruby on Rails (or something similar like Django), but think you could learn how to make a pull request for a small feature within two weeks, we’d like you to apply. We rather take the risk of looking at one application too many, than missing the right candidate.

Communication skills

Apart from technical skills, we highly value excellent communication skills and being proactive. You feel responsible for the delivery of the feature you’re working on and engage with the product team to find out what is the best technical solution to deliver what they have in mind. You are transparent about the progress you’re making and know when to ask for help.

Excitement about our mission

Lastly, you’re highly motivated to contribute to our mission. We believe that what we do at Effektiv Spenden makes a real difference in the world. While we value a good work-life balance (we rarely work more than 40 hours per week), we’re a small team that wants to achieve a lot, so you should be excited to throw yourself into work and go the extra mile when necessary.

What does the application process look like?

Stages

1. Send your CV/Linkedin
2. Screening interview (30 minutes)
3. Take home coding challenge (2-3 hours)
4. Technical interview (1 hour)
5. CEO interview
6. Paid work trial (1-2 days)
7. Reference calls

How to prepare for the application process

• Reflect on why you’re interested in the job.
• Consider how you can demonstrate that you’re good at communication and being proactive. Detailed examples from previous jobs or projects would be good for that.
• Brush up on your Rails and VueJS skills or start learning those technologies. Building a small sample app could help with this.

How long does the application process take?

For each stage of the process, we get back to candidates on average within 48 hours. The whole process could be completed within as little as 2 working weeks.

Ideally, we could fill this position in June or July, but we can wait longer for the ideal candidate.

I applied to you before and got rejected. Can I apply again?

Yes.

Not all of my questions have been answered. What should I do?

Feel free to ask any questions you have about the role in the comments!