Exodus is hiring one Product Designer for our brand-new, in-house Engineering team. After five years of building and maintaining our app with just one week per month of contracted development time, we’re taking things to the next level!
The Exodus Engineering team leverages a development methodology called Shape Up. According to this methodology, the roles of Product Designer & Frontend/UX Engineer are folded into one. Rather than designing features and then “throwing them over the wall” to engineering, we focus on defining what value a feature should provide and then give you the autonomy to figure out “how it works” and “how it looks.” For most projects, you’ll work alongside two senior engineers who integrate your frontend code with the backend systems.
This is a new position in the company, and we are looking for candidates with at least 5-7 years of experience, and who are excited to bring their design and engineering experience to bear upon the mission of Exodus.
ABOUT THE COMPANY:
Our mission is to free men through prayer, asceticism, and fraternity. We accomplish that through our spiritual exercises on the Exodus 90 app that helps men to live different from the world. The mission of our company is the foundation for how we run it. We believe that your job should support your vocation and not the other way around.
The Holy Spirit leads us. We started from nothing a few years ago; that we have reached over 60,000 men in over 70 countries in only a short time fills us with gratitude and awe. Our company is small. Right now, we have only thirteen full-time team members. That’s me (James), Nathaniel, Stephen, Doyle, Mark, Jacob, Nick, Deacon Michael, Kevin, Jared, John, Brock, and Chris. You’ll be #14, but you’ll always be more than a number to us and you will know the people with whom you work at Exodus.
We run on EOS (Entrepreneurial Operating System), which is an operating system for small businesses like ours. We have one leadership team meeting per week that lasts for 90 minutes and one department meeting per week that lasts for 60 minutes; we meet for one day per quarter and two days per year to review our strategic plan and set the goals we need to reach our 1-year plan, 3-year picture, and 10-year target.
We don’t dream of growing at all costs or selling the company for multiples. Instead, we want to create a place that fulfills a Catholic vision of work for those of us who are called and fortunate to have an opportunity to work here. Here’s what that means to us: that the Church and the family are the primary institutions over and above work; that compensation to market for a job well done is a matter of justice; that a peaceful and joyful while ambitious and excellent work environment is essential to a meaningful work experience; and that our employee’s crafts, skills, and natural abilities make a direct impact upon our mission.
ABOUT THE JOB AND THE WORK:
Every man’s experience of the Exodus 90 app is incredibly important to us. We want the app to “disappear” into the background of a man’s prayerful and fraternal experience. As such, frontend design and engineering need to be one of our strongest muscles. We strive for pixel perfection and a high level of intuitiveness. Our Head of Product often says that “we’re seeking to create one of the best, simplest, and most intuitive apps on the internet.” It’s a high bar, but we’re dreamers.
As we’re building our in-house engineering team, we are also deploying a development methodology called Shape Up started by Basecamp. You are highly encouraged to learn as much about this methodology as you can during this application/interview process. Here’s how it works: We don’t work from a backlog here at Exodus and then constantly sprint to insane two-week schedules. Instead, our Product Strategy Team (CEO, Head of Product, CTO) meets every six weeks to discuss ideas and priorities and then “bet” on the best ones. A bet is then handed on to a Cycle Team of 3 engineers to build. They’ll have 6 weeks to accomplish it and full autonomy to make the technical trade-offs necessary to ship the bet on time. If for whatever reason (bad scoping, unforeseen rabbit holes, etc.) a bet isn’t finished in the six-week cycle, it must go back to the Product Strategy Team and win another bet before we continue working on it. After the six-week cycles, we’ll have two weeks of “cool down”. You can use this time to finish that one tiny thing you couldn’t get to during the cycle, fix a bug that you’ve noticed, or do an R&D spike into something you’ve been thinking about.
The Exodus app is a Ruby-on-Rails API-driven backend and a single, cross-platform Ember.js frontend. About 90% of our app engineering work is frontend engineering. We consider HTML, CSS, and JavaScript to be essential capabilities of frontend engineers. Our men can access Exodus 90 from mobile browsers and right from the Google Play Store and App Store. We’ve drunk the kool-aid on the advantages of hybrid development and do not have plans at this time to go native.
As mentioned above, we don’t distinguish between frontend engineers and product designers. They are one and the same role. This allows us to keep our team lean and reduce bottlenecks in the product development process. We have a very well-defined visual brand and copious examples of common frontend elements (from buttons to lists, modal windows, pop-ups, and more), but at the end of the day, you are free to redesign existing visual elements as you go about bringing a feature to life. You are a designer and a frontend engineer and should have plenty of experience in both.
You will report to Chris, our CTO, who leads all of our development activities. At the start, you, Chris, and Brock (our Senior Engineer) will be the one and only Cycle Team at Exodus. Over the coming years, we may add one or two more teams. That’s to say, we are keeping our engineering team small on purpose.
This is a remote job. You’re free to work where you work best: home office, co-working space, coffee shops, here in the States, or that far-off place you’ve always wanted to live. Travel will not be a critical element to this job, but you are expected to join our team for bi-annual meetups (one in the Promised Land (i.e. Indiana) and one somewhere else) to get our full-time team together in one place every so often.
ABOUT YOU:
You should be very familiar with Exodus, someone who loves the Church, and is absolutely pumped at the opportunity to deploy your gifts and skills for our mission to men.
We value a Liberal Arts education, but that’s not required. A strong track record of conscientious, thoughtful work speaks volumes. You do not need to have worked in Church-world before this job.
Your code works and works well. In the last three years, we’ve built out our app and technology stack averaging just one week of development time per month, which everyone tells us is insane. We will never have a large engineering department, R&D team, or an army of quality assurance testers. It will just be you, our CTO, and Senior Engineer. You’ll work hand-in-hand with this team, and you’ll have all the support and direction you need to get up to speed, but we expect your code to be of the highest quality and self-vetted before you ship it off to our test environment for review.
We run our company on Basecamp, GSuite, and a few other tools. You do not have to know all of our systems on Day 1, but you should be able to pick up new web applications with ease.
We value “managers of one.” This is mostly because we do not have time for micromanagement. We appreciate people who can take a stand yet commit to the course of action even when they disagree. We subject ideas to rigorous consideration and challenge each other, but all remember that we’re here for the same purpose: to do good work together for our mission to men and for the Lord’s glory. That comes with direct feedback, openness to each others’ experience, and willingness to roll up our sleeves and get the work done.
We limit meetings, distractions, and notifications at Exodus. We block the mornings for deep work that stretches our minds. We avoid distracting chat tools, but we log everything in Basecamp for others to respond to when they have the time within their workflow. Because we are remote and communicate a-synchronously, we value good writers.
Lastly, you can expect other staff to listen and hear you. You can expect to give and provide direct feedback. You can expect to be counted on. You can expect to do your best work and build a career here. We build our team, our product, and our company for the long haul, and we enjoy the ride too. If this sound like a job for you, hop on board!
PAY AND BENEFITS:
Though Exodus is a ministry, we do not look to the Church as a benchmark for workplace culture or compensation. We operate on a software subscription business model. As a result, we peg our jobs to the software industry, and that’s to the benefit of everyone who works here. We operate on same position, same pay, no matter where you live. We currently pay in the 50th percentile of a software company based in Indianapolis, Indiana. As we grow, we will upgrade our percentile, and our market to Chicago, to pay more for the same jobs well done. As a result, we don’t negotiate salaries at Exodus. We receive independent third-party compensation data on the industry and automatically update compensation to market.
In addition, every employee at Exodus has the opportunity to become an owner through equity options, including this role.
Benefits at Exodus are all about helping you lead a healthy life outside of work. That starts with working no more than 40 hours a week on a regular basis and getting 8+ hours of sleep a night (if your children allow!). Our workplace and our benefits are designed to support a sustainable and healthy relationship with your work. Work for 8, sleep for 8, and then do whatever you please with the other 8, but please pray for at least 1. If you need to borrow 1 hour from your work day to pray, by all means, keep the first thing first. Oh, and we ask all team members to take cold showers every day. If that’s sounds funny, well, it’s not a joke.
The Commandments are at the heart of the Book of Exodus. As such, for no reason do we work on the Lord’s Day, Sunday. It can always wait until Monday.
You get 15 days of paid vacation, a few extra personal days to use at your discretion, select national holidays, the holy days of obligation, and a few corporate and personal patronal feast days as well. In the summer, we work 4-day weeks. We offer a fully-paid parental leave of one month for men, and two months for women.
All on the foundation of a healthcare program that corresponds to the mission of our company. We do not offer group health insurance; we are too small to opt out of coverages that contradict the teachings of the Church. As such, you choose the health coverage you would like, whether that’s insurance or a healthcare sharing ministry like many of us have chosen. And we reimburse you up to $1,500 per month to cover your premium and other qualified medical expenses.
On the day you start, you will receive a $500k term-life insurance policy, as well as disability insurance which will last throughout your employment at Exodus. We do not offer a 401(k) at this time, but you better believe that when we do you will be able to buy Bitcoin in it.
We pay for all of your software and hardware needs. We pay for your cell phone, laptop, and monitors. When you join the company you’ll be given a company credit card to spend wisely as you need.
We work on our company just like we work on our product. We don’t have it all figured out, but we’ve optimized a lot over the past seven years. And we will welcome your voice in shaping the best place that we could ever dream to work.
HOW TO APPLY
We want to get a sense of how you think. To that end, please use your cover letter to share with us your take on the following questions:
- Why are you passionate about men’s formation?
- Please articulate your views about the intersection of the Christian life and technology in our ever-more technological world.
- Tell us about your frontend engineering experience. What’s your favorite feature you’ve shipped? Best product experience you’ve built?
- What’s one thing that’s common in the software industry that you vehemently disagree with?
- Tell us about the software thought leaders you follow. Who are they? Why do you value their opinions?
We value great writers, so take your time with the application. Keep in mind that we do not equate length with substance, so please keep your cover letter to fewer than 1,000 words. Stock cover letters won’t do – tell us why you want this job, not just any job.
Please send us a link to your public GitHub profile so we can review your open-source contributions.
We are accepting applications for this position until February 10, 2023. We want to fill the position to start March 1, 2023, but we will not force the process until we’ve found someone we believe is the right fit for this important role. We will start by filtering down the applications, and then send a technical test before interviews begin. 3-5 candidates will be selected for 1-2 interviews with our leadership and product teams. And we’ll make the call from there.
You can submit your application by clicking here.
Thank you for taking the time to apply, and we can’t wait to hear from you!
