Full Stack Engineer

Exodus is hiring a second Full Stack Developer for our Engineering team. We are looking for senior-level engineering candidates with 5+ years of experience.

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 overall user experience are incredibly important to us. We strive for pixel perfection and a high level of intuitiveness. In our minds, every engineer on our team is responsible for delivering a delightful user experience. 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.

The Exodus app is a Ruby-on-Rails API-driven backend hosted on Heroku with a single, cross-platform Ember.js frontend. The frontend is packaged in a Cordova wrapper and shipped to Apple's App Store and Google's Play Store. Our database schema is PostgreSQL. We consider HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and Ruby-on-Rails to be essential skills for our full stack engineers. We've drunk the kool-aid on the advantages of hybrid development, but know that Cordova is an older platform facing end-of-life. As such, we're taking a serious look at Hotwire and Turbo and hope to roll out a Turbo iOS proof-of-concept in the next 12 months. If you're not familiar with Hotwire, take a look, and let us know what you think about it in your cover letter.

The Exodus Engineering team leverages a development methodology called Shape Up, with a few tweaks that optimize it for our small team. At the heart of the Shape Up methodology is the system of 6-week cycles. Rather than sprinting 2 weeks at a time against a mountainous backlog, we bet on larger, value-driving projects and give you 6 weeks of uninterrupted time to "figure it out" and "get it done." And done means shipped. Any work that hasn't been completed in the time allotted to it, by default, is not continued, but needs to win another bet. After the six-week cycle, we take two weeks of dedicated "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.

You will report to Doyle, our Head of Product who leads all of our development activities. You will work alongside Brock (Senior Engineer). Sometimes the two of you will work in tandem on the same bet; other times you will work on separate bets. In either case, we value collegiality and the cross-pollination of expertise and ideas.

This is a remote job. You’re free to work where you work best, but we're only considering candidates based in the United States at this time. Travel will not be a critical element to this job, but you are expected to join our team for bi-annual meetups (our Annual Meeting & our Annual Retreat), where we get our full-time team together in one place every so often.

You should be familiar with Exodus, love the Church, and 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. We're also not afraid of "late specialization" - in fact, we value it. If your career path hasn't taken a linear trajectory (whether in terms of job function, industry, or skillset), tell us about that in your cover letter.

Your code works and works well. From 2018 to 2022, we built our app and technology stack averaging just one week of development time per month, which everyone tells us is insane. In early 2023, we hired our first full-time member of our Engineering Team. We will never have a large engineering department, R&D team, or an army of quality assurance testers. It will just be you, our Head of Product (Doyle), and our Senior Engineer (Brock) for now. 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 exist to share the uncommon freedom of Jesus Christ with men so that they can become who they are. 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 100,000 men in over 70 countries in only a short time fills us with gratitude and awe. Our company is small and you will know the people with whom you work at Exodus.

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.

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 and we peg our jobs to the software industry. 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 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 each year.

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. 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 your work-related software and hardware needs. We pay for your cell phone service, 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.

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:

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.

Thank you for taking the time to apply, and we can’t wait to hear from you!

Peace of Jesus Christ,
James Baxter
Founder & CEO