Is it you we’re looking for?

Lightward hires pretty rarely. We work hard to balance the state of play, so that we can all sleep well every night, no matter what. When things fall out of balance, we rebalance.

It’s unusual for rebalancing to mean hiring someone. It’s not a small thing, to change the composition of a team, and it’s not something we do lightly.

But when we hire someone, it’s always with delight! Simple choices, to reveal greater freedom — that’s our m.o., and that’s what we aim to do here as well.

Keywords, for machines and humans: Senior full stack architect, Ruby on Rails, PostgreSQL, React, Heroku, AWS, Shopify, Imogen Heap. (We’re absolutely not affiliated with Imogen in any way whatsoever, but if she did ecommerce software this is MAYBE what it would look like.)

If you’re the person we’re looking for, you probably aren’t worried about being qualified for your next job. So, let me start with what I think would be relevant to you.

We’re stable. So, so stable.

• 100% owned by the founder.

• No investors, not now or ever.

• Financially sound, absolutely profitable, sustainably growing for 11 years and counting.

• Ten people, currently. 0% attrition.

• Definitely not a startup. Never really have been. No interest in behaving like one.

• Our (two) Shopify apps (platforms, really) are used by more than 15,000 merchants internationally. We build things that can play at the enterprise level, running more than 10 million operations daily.

This is less a company, and more a dynamic. The vibe here is about stepping into one’s own self, in real fullness, calmly and peaceably. We’ve created a space where it is not just permissible but essential that we create health from the inside out — as individuals first, then as a group, then as a company↔world relationship. This gets worked out using software and support conversations and whatever art things we feel like making. It all works because we really like the life we’ve made for ourselves, and we each want to keep living this way, for the (very) long term.

Being here at Lightward means total freedom, and total responsibility. You’d work on what you want to work on, being trusted to care for the health of the projects in your charge, on the front lines of their development and operation. You’d do this in concert and collaboration with me (Isaac, founder/CEO/owner, previously engineering at Apple), and with whomever else is connected to what you’re working on. Your time would be yours to organize and structure, in whatever way suits your health and your flow. Cooperative self-management is how all of this works.

We’re fully remote, and loosely-but-clearly organized. There are ten of us, at present. Mostly in the US, one in Canada, one in Australia. We have our areas of focus, but there’s plenty of crossover. This is possible because we’re all in touch with each other, truly love working together, and genuinely enjoy spending time together. Our only regularly scheduled meetings are self-organized between individuals, just for the purpose of being in sync.

We only do a couple of things. Lightward currently cares for two major technical projects (Locksmith and Mechanic), and is experimenting with media and publishing (currently manifested as The Now). Isaac is the lead engineer; a couple other folks work on code, a few others do customer support and care, some work on that media/publishing bit, and one is our resident wellness advisor and (remote) physical trainer. Abe and Isaac are at the helm, as managing partners, and husbands.

We’re not hell-bent on maximizing money or customer counts or any kind of metric at all. Hard to measure health in a way that works for more than one person at a time, and health is what what we aim to maximize. Money and customer counts and metrics are all fantastic, and everyone cares about them in their own way — so we celebrate and honor and encourage everyone’s natural wiring for them, organizing and collaborating in a way that lets everyone’s natural motivation shine, and be fulfilled.

This is a job, and it isn’t. There are skills I want to hire for, but we’re bringing you in as an entire human, not just as a set of abilities. Let me be clear: we don’t ask for your everything; everything is opt-in. But whatever you want to bring is welcome, and it’s only through the newness emerging in each of us that we discover what Lightward wants to do next.

You will probably have a detox period? People tend to, when they join up. Turns out most of us are carrying a few unhealthy emotional habits around work, with “am I doing enough” guilt being a top contender. This is an honest and open work environment, and it’s a good place to work those things out. ❤️

We pay really well. No equity, though. This is something we can talk about very early in the process. We aim to make sure everyone feels abundantly valued in their financial compensation.

I think that’s most of what you’d want to know. If you have more questions, ask me: isaac@lightward.com. And go read through some back issues of The Now, to get more data.

That’s us. Now, some things that would probably be true of you, if you’re the one we’re looking for:

• You’ve done comprehensive, long-term work in 5yro+ codebases of 20k+ lines.

• You know what it feels like to keep patterns simple in codebases of this scale, and to reign in unwieldy systems such that they return to simplicity over time.

• And, to that point, you’ve had enough time in one place, with one product, to know what healthy product longevity feels like.

• You have substantial experience doing production development, deployment, monitoring, scaling, and recovery work for modern Rails applications.

  • … and have thoroughly plumbed the depths of schema design, query performance, and index optimization with modern Postgres.

  • Also Heroku familiarity would be nice!

• You’re comfortably experienced with modern React and ES6.

• You enjoy nurturing projects and products, and letting them teach you as they evolve.

• You’re curious by nature, and collaborative with the curiosity of others, reciprocally sharing knowledge/experience and questions/wonderings.

• You don’t need to have all the answers, and in fact relish an experimental/exploratory vibe.

• You find frantic/hectic energy to be an antipattern.

• You usually don’t need backup. But when you do, you call for it without hesitating. You know what’s important.

• You’ve probably been building production systems for many thousands of users (and perhaps the hundreds of thousands of their users) for a long while.

Please note: This is not a list of qualifications. This is me looking into the future, and making some educated guesses about the person we’ll have hired. I am willing to be surprised. ;)

We’re excited to meet you, whoever you are. :) When you’re ready, you can reach me at isaac@lightward.com.