What we’re doing

80% of the global workforce doesn’t sit behind a desk - think retail assistants, waiters, bartenders, care assistants, nurses and so on. But up until now only 1% of funding has gone into building tools for them.

As a desk based worker it’s hard to imagine working without tools like Slack, Trello and Gmail, but for much of the deskless workforce, that’s the current state of play.

The only way to find out what shifts you’re working is to look at a print out taped to the break room wall. Changes to shifts are scribbled on the printout, photographed then sent to WhatsApp groups. Managers spend hours calling and texting trying and often not succeeding to fill overtime shifts. Payslips are sent in the post or accessed via web 1.0 portals and holiday is requested either in-person or through clunky legacy kiosks. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

The result is a dissatisfied workforce, soaring rates of attrition and tens of billions wasted in lost productivity, re-hiring and unnecessary agency spend.

This same workforce is accustomed to the very best in user experience, WhatsApp for messaging, Monzo for banking and AirBnB for holidays.

So where is the work app?

That’s what we’re building at Sona. The single app that will deliver a best in class user experience for deskless workers to manage their entire work life.

We’re still early on in our journey so anyone getting involved has scope to have a huge impact.

We’ve raised a $2.2m pre-seed round from some amazing investors including SpeedInvest and Notion Capital. We have a highly experienced founding team and amazing sales, marketing and customer success people as well as some exceptional engineering and product design talent.

About the role

You’ll be working as part of a fully remote, close knit product team. We use Github + ZenHub for code hosting and project management and operate an extremely lightweight sprint based process.

We like engineers to be heavily involved throughout the product development process, not just in building.

Our stack has two main components:

• A backend with a GraphQL API and web frontend built using Elixir and Phoenix Live View
• A native mobile application built in React Native + Typescript

We think in terms of “T Shaped” developers. This means that while all of us have some ability across the “full stack”, most of us have one side of the stack (e.g. Elixir or React Native) we’re stronger on and spend the bulk of our time on.

Typically when somebody starts working with us, they have strong experience with one side of the stack and then learn the other part on the job.

About You

We love engineers who have a non nonsense approach to “getting it shipped”, who when given the choice between “complicated and shiny” vs “get something simple in front of a user” will always choose the latter.

Everybody’s different, but a lot of the following probably applies to you:

• You have extensive professional experience in Elixir or React Native (you don't need both!!)
• If your experience is in Elixir, you’re happy to talk about OTP, Erlang, Beam and how these relate to each other. You’ve built things using LiveView and are comfortable talking about it’s advantages and challenges.
• If your experience is in React Native you’re happy to talk about Typescript, the role of generics and when they should be used, what hooks are, how they changed how we build React Native apps and when one should consider writing custom hooks. You’d be equally happy explaining promises and how they interact with async / await
• You have a strong preference for over-communication, and take ownership of ensuring you fully understand what you’re working on
• You’re in a country which is GMT +/- 3 and fluent communicating both verbally and in writing in English

How We Work

We’re a fully remote team spread across 4 countries (and growing). We have a company stand up most mornings at 10:00 UK time. We aim to have fully paid for company meetups roughly once per quarter.

Everything starts with talking to customers. We like everyone in the company to regularly join either sales calls with new prospects or catch ups with existing customers

We’re a small company with a strong preference for lightweight, asynchronous processes. Within product we work in sprints with periodic retrospectives.

Interview Process

Our interview process follows this pattern:

• Initial phone screen (15-30 minutes) focused primarily on approach to work, career goals and your questions about Sona
• Paid Technical Task (0.5 days, pays GBP200)
• Technical Task Review (1 hour, much more interested with “why did you do what you did” than “did you finish x”)
• Founder Interview (1 hour), focused on why you’re interested in Sona and your questions about the vision

Benefits

• Competitive salary
• Employee share option scheme
• New M1 Macbook + equipment grant for home office
• Co-working stipend
• 4.5 day standard working week (take your half day out when it suits you)
• Unlimited free books