Build your next SaaS integration in one day

Senior UX Engineer

$120k - $210k / 0.50% - 2.00%
Location
Remote
Job Type
Full-time
Experience
6+ years
Connect directly with founders of the best YC-funded startups.
Apply to role ›
Trey Griffith
Trey Griffith
Founder

About the role

We're hiring a Senior UX Engineer to help us define and deliver the user experience for Xkit.

We're a small team without a dedicated designer, so this role is responsible for determining the best UI/UX patterns to employ (using our existing patterns and frameworks where possible) as well as delivering them in the form of working, performant code.

This is a highly product- and user-focused role. We're looking for the rare combination of a highly capable React/Typescript engineer paired with a good UX and design sense.

We have four different types of users that we need to serve:

  • Our customers' engineers
  • Our customers' product managers, who add additional integrations with less technical skill using our developer portal (React, Typescript, Evergreen)
  • Our customers' customer success managers, who customize individual integrations for specific customers using our developer portal (React, Typescript, Evergreen)
  • Our customers' end users, who set up and customize their integrations using xkit.js (Typescript) or xkit-catalog.js (React, Typescript, Evergreen)

We have an incredible number of technical and design challenges in order to deliver a product:

  • capable of complex and highly customizable integrations
  • approachable by less technical users
  • maintainable and extensible by an engineering team

That means a combination of "no code", "low code", and sometimes "yes please code" interaction patterns that is hard to get right.

As our first UX engineer, this role will also be responsible for setting our design and front-end engineering foundation for the future of the product and the team.

From the technical side, our front-end is:

And our back-end is:

  • Elixir
  • Phoenix
  • PostgreSQL

Requirements

  • Native-level proficiency in spoken and written English
  • 6+ years as a professional software developer
  • Significant professional experience with React
  • Fully remote, but able to meet at 9am PT once a week with ~2 hours of overlap between 9am and 2pm PT most week days

What we look for:

  • Customer oriented: thinks through features from the customer's perspective and delivers with the customer in mind
  • A "designer who codes": highly capable as a designer working within an existing design system/framework
  • Strong written and spoken communication skills
  • Writes clear code (*the presentation deals with Elixir, but the concepts are applicable to writing any kind of code!)
  • Highly productive: able to ship new features and refactors quickly

Hiring Process

  1. Submit a work resume or CV
  2. Complete a short online evaluation (~30 min)
  3. Submit relevant coding samples
  4. Video interview with our CEO
  5. 1-2 week (paid) working trial

We rely heavily on working trials to serve as an extended interview for both you and us. We've found they are the best way for us to evaluate candidates and for candidates to judge whether the fast-paced, high autonomy startup style of working is for them.

Why you should join Xkit

Software is eating the world, and that software is going to be connected together. Xkit is helping bring that future to fruition by building tools that make it easier for developers to add integrations to their apps.

We're a small, fully remote team. We pride ourselves on being able to "punch above our weight" - our ability to build products better and faster than teams that are orders of magnitude larger. We are first principles thinkers in everything from technical design to how we run engineering processes. Everyone on the team is capable of and prefers to operate with high levels of autonomy, but we often collaborate at the design level to find the best solutions for our customers.

We focus obsessively on the holistic customer experience, trying to figure out how best we can help the customer (even when that means teaching them the best way to do it themselves rather than selling them something). We cut scope aggressively, striving to deliver only what is absolutely needed and nothing superfluous. We take delight in our customers' delights - the little things that make a product a pleasure to use - which we don't consider superfluous, but rather essential to the product experience.

We try to operate by principles rather than by processes or rules.

Examples of how these attitudes manifest in our day-to-day lives include:

  • No standups: no added value for our current team size
  • Ignoring code coverage: tests should make our and our customers' lives better; we're after practical bug prevention, not a magic number
  • One command deploys: changing code in production should be easy to do and easy to do right

We expect all members of our team to be:

  • focused: on the customer, on the product, and on the business
  • skilled: highly skilled in their field; good critical thinkers and fast learners outside of it
  • workers: action-oriented, finishers, willing to contribute outside their area of expertise

About the Product

Xkit lets developers add direct, native, embedded integrations to their SaaS app as easily as building a Zapier app. With one straightforward integration to Xkit, developers can add integrations to Salesforce, HubSpot, Zendesk, and others without writing any additional code. Most of the time, those integrations can even be added by non-engineers, like product managers and customer success managers.

Unlike other products in the market, we're built from the ground up to serve the needs of developers and make sure we're a stable part of their infrastructure even as their integrations grow more complex. That's led to a few key decisions that differentiate us from the competition:

  • We work with your existing API so that data flows through your application before hitting your database
  • We allow for historical data sync
  • New data and updates to data is on a low latency basis (<2 minutes) so your customers' data is always up to date in your app
  • We expose all of the data offered by the APIs you're integrating with
  • We're fully white-labeled and give you direct access to the underlying API credentials (like OAuth tokens) so you can extend integrations beyond what we do
Xkit
Founded:2018
Team Size:5
Location:San Francisco
Founders
Trey Griffith
Trey Griffith
Founder