Founding Product Engineer

We're crafting it to be a full-blown collaborative experience: introducing fun, transparency, and connectedness on top of a 40-year-old protocol. We’re building it as a place where teams can get clarity of mind as a group, while letting individuals maintain control and focus. Read our manifesto here

🧢 What the job involves

As a founding engineer at Upstream, you’ll play a fundamental role in shaping the company and the product. This role will be primarily hands-on building.

With our support, you’ll be actively contributing to the technical direction of Upstream. You’re walking into a company with great foundations (great investors, lots of runway, unique product vision, and a solid technical base) and you’ll have a huge influence on our future. Expect to:

• Develop a fast & reliable email application across mobile and web
• Build production-ready software, and ship it to lots of people
• Actively contribute to our engineering culture and practices
• Be pragmatic in determining which tech investments to make now versus later
• Contribute to building an amazing company where people enjoy showing up every day and having fun together

💡 Some topics you’ll think about:

• Building a blazingly fast application: how do we craft an application that is extremely responsive and reliable, ensuring an outstanding user experience?
• Designing a scalable system for extensive message processing: what approaches do we adopt to efficiently handle large volumes of messages while ensuring two-way synchronization with the email layer?
• Developing cross-platform for mobile and web: how do we architect our software to provide a seamless experience across all platforms?

👨‍💻 About you

We’re looking for the following key traits in the person that will join us:

• Product-Minded. You're comfortable crafting products based on protocols that haven't evolved much, challenging the status quo to create innovative experiences. You understand how engineering decisions impact users and you keep users in mind at all times.
• Fast & Reliable UX. You're committed to building fast & stable software that our users rely on and enjoy using on a daily basis.
• Eye for detail. We’re building a product that users will spend their day in – so every minor glitch or performance issue is amplified. You love to sweat the details to create a flawless experience in every product interaction.
• Scalable Solutions. You understand how to design and build robust, scalable architectures that perform efficiently at scale. You're experienced in creating systems that can handle growth and complexity without compromising on performance.
• Evolutive Software. You know to be pragmatic with your solutions, while ensuring a solid foundation for future growth, in order to balance speed and stability.
• You can move fast and ship quickly. Shipping is an extremely important part of the culture at Upstream – you bias for action and get stuff out the door quickly.

We also look for the following traits in every single member of our team:

• Humility & Respect. You understand that diversity of backgrounds and viewpoints is a strength to cherish and cultivate. You’re excited to work in a multi-cultural environment with people from many different horizons.
• Ownership & Proactivity. You can ship and get things done. You’re comfortable owning problems end-to-end, and feel ownership of bringing them to closure.
• High intensity. You are excited to work with dedication and intensity. We do value balance in everything we do, and believe that recharging one’s batteries early and often is key. Yet we’re very early stage, and we need to put in the effort and time to make our ambitions a reality.
• Collaborative mindset. You care about shipping your work more than being right. You’re excited to work with the whole team to bring new ideas from concept to production. You’re open to feedback and know how to listen deeply.

❤️ You’re a great fit if:

• You’re excited to work with us in person in our Paris office. We value in-person collaboration and seeing each other every day enables us to have fun, move fast, and stay deeply creative.
• You’re excited to work in a fun and light-hearted manner, and enjoy bringing your whole self to work, including everything that is weird about you.
• You enjoy rolling up your sleeves and tackling everything from system architecture to front-end performance, to monitoring production environments. Yes, we're primarily looking for a skilled problem-solver, but in the early days, we all need to get our hands dirty and contribute across the stack.

✨ Life at Upstream

• Equity and salary reflect the high level of impact of this role. We want to work with the best and we’re ready to pay for it.
• We offer best-in-class healthcare coverage (100% coverage for you and your dependents)
• We value diversity of viewpoints, backgrounds, and origins. We believe amazing talent comes from all kinds of life journeys, and we love having people join us from all over the world. We make it dead simple to relocate to Paris:
• Managing your sponsored visa process
• Financial support to cover your relocation expenses
• Help with French paperwork: social security account, tax forms and more
• French lessons to help settle in your new Parisian life

A meeting lands on your calendar

If they’re a yes, I book the chat. You show up — that’s the whole job-hunt.