Hello there 👋

Thanks for your interest in Inex One!

I'm Filip, one of the founders and tech leads of Inex One. I’ll be reviewing your application if you choose to apply 🙂 . You would be Engineer #7 in a team that also has two designers and one PM. In total, Inex One is made up of 22 colleagues, from Singapore to New York. Below you'll find detailed sections on what we think you should know about us before deciding to join us. This is pretty texty, so feel free to hop down to the sections that interest you most!

The story of Inex One

When my co-founders Max, Mehdi, Josefine and I started Inex One in Stockholm early 2018 we set out to improve global knowledge sharing. Knowledge (in the form of research reports, access to experts, data etc.) is still hard to come by: it’s expensive, siloed and hard to find.

The expert network industry is one of those industries that almost no one has heard of, but still has an enormous impact. In short it’s all about helping organizations get in contact with experts to provide insights and information. It is also an industry with huge margins, lots of inefficiencies and a pricing model (huge up-front contracts) that keeps smaller organizations out.

During the past three years we've helped organizations small and large come in contact with thousands of experts. We have a small and effective team that believes in working smarter, not harder. It's amazing what a small team of focused and capable individuals can accomplish. We don't have many meetings, and most of our work happens asynchronously on GitHub and Slack. Everyone is included and can see every discussion or decision they want to contribute to.

Right now I think Inex is really at a sweet spot.

• Small enough that every team member can have a significant impact. 

• Large enough that we can offer a stable working environment, competitive salaries, solid project management and well defined tasks. 

• Close to profitability, growing steadily with strong investor backing. We are now focused on growing into a stable and profitable company without additional external investment.

The product

Our product connects organizations doing research with expert networks that are specialized in finding experts in different fields and geographies. We support over 25 expert networks and hundreds of clients, doing dozens of expert calls every day. Our clients come in all shapes and sizes such as consultancies, corporates, PE funds and non-profits. We are proud to have clients on all continents except Antarctica (not yet!).

There is a lot of work of the typical CRUD + notifications type on the platform. But we also have elements of recommendation algorithms, NLP (transcripts, summaries, sentiment analysis), browser plugins, search and our own conferencing system (built on top of Twilio). 

We try to be pragmatic about product management and we've learned a lot. In the beginning we thought we knew more than we did and spent a lot of time on the wrong things. Nowadays we take UX, planning and user interviews very seriously. For any larger tasks we create working groups consisting of UX, tech and business that shape a feature together before detailed designs and coding begin. We don’t adhere to any specific methodology, most seem geared towards larger companies, but have taken inspiration from agile and shape-up.

Upcoming technical work

• 50% creating larger features based on client or expert network needs. Some examples of upcoming projects are improved search, transcript summaries and better calendar management.

• 20% smaller features. Often it's little product changes that can add lots of value. This often involves learning more about user needs in order to come up with the best and simplest solution.

• 10% bug fixes, at most. Thanks to really solid CI, decent tests and consistent code written for readability and maintainability we have few bugs that are usually easy to fix.

• 20% tech debt elimination and work on improving the developer experience. We prioritize ease of development very highly and have for the past year always had at least one team member focus on this.

Requirements

Skills

• 5+ years in software development

• Experience of leading software development work

• The ability to ship solid, testable and readable code (ideally React, Node & Typescript)

• Understand how web apps work and have a good understanding of deployments, browsers, servers etc.

• Effective written and verbal English

• Able to communicate with other people on a project team effectively

• [bonus] Experience with DevOps, search (such as Elastic), NLP, postgres

Personality

• Eager to take ownership and lead the development of one of our product areas

• Willing to learn, grow and work as a team

• Believe that empathy and effective communication is important

• Preference towards the simplest solution rather than the most technically interesting one

• Pragmatic and able to make decisions with incomplete information, not afraid to ask for clarification

• Strong sense of responsibility for upholding product stability and quality

After the first 6 months we expect you to

• have shipped several features

• be communicating effectively in the team

• be leading engineering decisions

The code-base

Our philosophy has always been to keep things simple and readable. The business we are in will never lead to huge traffic volumes so it’s better to focus on developer productivity, simplicity and security rather than optimizations, advanced infrastructure and micro-services. 

The entire codebase is written in typescript with React+Node+Postgres. This was a very conscious choice because it allows code sharing and lets developers move seamlessly between the front and back end. This allows for more varied tasks and a deeper understanding of the system as a whole.

Here are some points about how we do things currently

• We release multiple times per week (merge to master = release)

• We share lots of types and files between the front-end and the back-end, since it's all typescript!

• Monorepo setup using Yarn workspaces. Linting, code styling and type checking throughout the code-base. Everything is integrated with VSCode.

• GitHub workflow. PRs close GitHub issues that we manage in a Kanban board. Every PR deploys a full working environment where back-end and front-end can be accessed live.

Remote work at Inex

Inex is remote first, we are currently 6 developers living in 6 different countries. That means our processes are built for remote work from the get go. Code reviews, pair programming and joint planning sessions are built into the process. As are (very short) daily stand-ups, retrospectives and times when we can share what we have built and learned. 

Still there is something that happens when you meet face to face, have a nice dinner and a beer or two. We make sure to have regular retreats together and visit each other. Most recently the team has visited Stockholm and Paris.

The role is remote but we are currently open to candidates within 2 hours of our timezone (CET) in order to reduce issues with meeting times and synchronous collaboration.

Here are some of the perks of the job

• Ability to have an impact from day 1

• Fun, sharp and diverse set of colleagues

• Freedom and responsibility to set your own schedule

• Work from home (or from a co-working space)

• Regular team retreats to fun locations

• Low amount of time spent in meetings

• Yearly budget for learning and development

• Computer & phone setup of your choice

• Financially stable company

• Sizable equity compensation

• Market rate salary compensation

In the interest of transparency please consider these reasons not to join us:

• You prefer working in a “ticket factory” where each ticket is precisely defined, you do it and then you forget about it and move on. This is still a small company, you are expected to think for yourself: what could make this task better? What have we missed? etc.

• You think more features and complex technology is the best way to solve all problems.

• You want to spend all day writing complex algorithms and optimizing code to shave off the last millisecond. Problem solving for us is mostly about figuring out customer needs and trying to solve them in the cleanest and simplest way possible.