Who We Are:

Founded in 2013, Thistle is a leading tech-enabled food and nutrition company that delivers ready-to-eat meals right to your doorstep. We empower our customers to get and stay healthy while improving the sustainability of our food system. Thistle began as a single pop-up location in San Francisco, going from selling cold-pressed juices to delivering nearly 15 million delicious, healthy, plant-forward meals, organic cold-pressed juices, and snacks.

About the Senior Engineer role:

We’re looking for Senior Software Engineers to help build the technology to bring health and happiness to our customers. You’ll work on our consumer web and mobile apps as well as the operations systems that enable us to cook and deliver an ever-growing number of meals every month. 

We understand that everyone is going to have strengths and weaknesses with regards to different aspects of being a software engineer. We encourage you to apply even if you feel some of the expectations would be challenging to meet!

Our stack:

Currently the primary technologies we use are Python, Django, Javascript, React, Heroku and AWS. While experience with some or all of our stack is appreciated, it is definitely not a prerequisite. We feel the qualities we are looking for in an engineer(see above) are much more important, and are definitely willing to invest the time to train an engineer up on a specific technology.

The application process:

When you apply to be a software engineer, the hiring manager will read your application. We do not have any automated bots filtering out applicants, so no need to stuff your resume with keywords! We’re making a renewed commitment to respond to everyone who applies for this role, and are targeting our response to candidates within a week. If we think you would make a good addition to our team, theHiring Manager will reach out to schedule a time to chat with you. 

If you and the Hiring Manager both agree to move forward, the next step will be a technical interview. All of our technical interviews are centered around real problems that you might face here at Thistle - no FizzBuzz or other nonsense! Our technical problems are also language-agnostic, so don’t worry if you aren’t familiar with our stack. 

If you and the hiring manager both agree to move forward, the final stage will be a ~3 hour interview. During the course of the interview, you’ll meet with 3 different panels. One of the panels will focus on a technical discussion of a real problem, and the other two will focus on your values, work experience, and communication skills. 

We believe that following this process gives us the best shot at understanding your current skills, strengths and weaknesses. We are asking you to demonstrate your technical competence as part of the interview, so it’s important to note that we’re agnostic as to how you achieved that skill. 

You can see a full breakdown of how we define Senior Software Engineers here.

Some highlights:

• We expect Senior Software Engineers to act as leaders on the team. This can manifest in a number of different ways, but common examples are introducing new coding best practices and mentoring other engineers.
• We expect Senior Software Engineers to deliver organized, reliable, performant, tested code relatively quickly. They keep our code standards high.
• We expect Senior Software Engineers to be able to clearly express your thoughts and opinions to other people through a variety of mediums. You are able to demonstrate patience, compassion and respect when communicating with others, especially when disagreeing.
• We expect Senior Software Engineers to understand the bigger picture. They help the team resolve ambiguity, and can weigh the hard tradeoffs when there is no right or easy answer.

The work - In terms of specific projects you might work on should you join today:

• Working with the entire product team to redesign and improve our applications to help them scale to new regions.
• Collaborate with our operations, finance, and growth teams to help refine our predictions to further reduce the amount of food waste, and ensure we always have enough meals on hand to meet our demand.
• Collaborate with our operations and culinary teams to help build and improve tooling to help streamline and improve out food production processes.
• Team up with all of engineering to move our architecture towards a more modern setup using containers, paving the way for us to move closer to a service-oriented architecture instead of a monolith.