Software Engineer

FireCut is hiring a software engineer who will support development of the tool as we add new features, fix bugs, and use customer feedback to determine our roadmap.

What is FireCut?

• FireCut is an AI video editor, provided to customers as a plugin for Adobe Premiere Pro.

• Company stage: Bootstrapped, 1.5 years post-launch, team of 4. If you're successful you will take over the technical aspects of the product development, and will possibly manage more engineers as we scale.

What will I do in this role?

Key responsibilities of this role include

• Building something amazing!

• Feature development — you will own the development of new features in FireCut.

• Bug fixing — you will own the bug-fixing process end-to-end, which will involve reading customer feedback, recreating bugs and finding the root cause, fixing bugs in the code, etc.

• Server management — you will own server uptime and take steps to optimise the server setup.

• User communication — you will help respond to user feedback and requests.

Who you are

• You are looking for that once-in-a-career opportunity where you can go from idea to shipped feature that’s in users’ hands in DAYS

• Working on the same problem for months / having little impact makes you want to flip a table

• You like to do programming projects in your spare time

• You are passionate about automating repetitive / manual tasks

• When working in a team, you take ownership of your work ( = you view yourself as the ultimate accountable person for your work, if something breaks on a weekend and your users are stranded you genuinely want to fix it ASAP)

• You are comfortable* (what does this mean? some non-exhaustive guidance below…) with:

  • HTML. Comfortable = you know how to use <canvas> (how do you draw shapes, text, images, etc.), what the default method is for a <form> (GET or POST?), how <script> tags are loaded from the HTML and how async and defer each affect it (they are different!)

  • TailwindCSS. Comfortable = you can almost fully recreate a page like this without needing to reference the docs because you know the classes by heart

  • JavaScript. Comfortable = you can polyfill existing types such as String to add new functionality (e.g. formatting a filename String for different platforms with a polyfill like String.toPlatform(”mac”)), you regularly use Array map, filter, find and reduce, you populate pre-allocated arrays instead of using Array.push(), you know the difference between a Set and an Array and why you would use each, and how to use ESLint to clean up your code

  • Node.js. Comfortable = you know what a package.json file is used for and what different keys inside it, such as scripts, dependencies and devDependencies, are for. You know key npm commands — such as install (and when you would use the -g flag), ls, prune, and the command used to remove packages (remove, delete, uninstall?) — off by heart, and that you shouldn’t commit node_modules to git

  • Python / Django. Comfortable = you know how to write and import modules, how to do multi-threading within Python, how to write classes, how to use Django’s ORM and migrations, how to extend Django’s middleware and how to integrate with queueing systems like Celery

  • Linux, Nginx, Postgres. Comfortable = you can setup a basic server (i.e. this tutorial is NOT new stuff), write systemd services, and basic bash scripts

    
    

Who you are NOT (because this is not for everyone)

• You dislike the idea of grinding for a project in a startup environment

• You want a reliable 9-5 job with no risk and a reliable trajectory

• You prefer a manager to take the ultimate responsibility for decisions in your team

• You are a perfectionist and not comfortable with shipping stuff before 100% perfect

What else do I need to know about the job?

• We’re fully remote — to facilitate this, we work through a contractor rather than employee setup for our team

• We’re a very small team with no politics

• You’ll work with and learn directly from the founder

• We’re a fast-growing company

• You’ll work on interesting problems

• You’re going to have a HUGE impact on the product and the company

• You’ll always be working on something new

• We include profit-sharing as part of your comp so you get a direct benefit when the company does well