Career Opportunities

Our small development team needs an experienced hands-on technical leader. We’re looking for someone who can make the big decisions about how to architect and implement what we’re building, while also being elbow-deep reviewing code contributions and coaching the rest of the team.

We hope to find someone technically opinionated and operationally experienced who can own the development process and have the last word on code quality. Supporting & mentoring the team as you build out an operationally-mature development and deployment process ensuring that we write and ship high quality code smoothly and efficiently on a continuous-integration and weekly deployment model without major releases.

As a small startup, we all step up where needed to support other aspects of the business. You might or might not have some experience with other business disciplines; either way, you enjoy the variety that this brings to your work.

This role will hire at the director level or above and report directly to the CEO. In a larger organization, a role with similar responsibilities might be called CTO. Compensation will initially be sustainable but not market rate, and will grow quickly, in step with the expansion of our customer base. There are also very generous equity options.

What you’ll be doing

These are your core responsibilities as we currently understand them. We don’t expect you to have done all these things before, just to be ready and willing to try.

• Leading a small Python development team.

  • Coaching, supporting, & pairing with other developers and helping them grow their skills.

  • Reviewing, improving, and approving code contributions from the rest of the team.

  • Defining code quality and style standards and helping everyone perform at that level.

• Building out an operationally mature development process based on continuous integration.

  • Creating our software development lifecycle from CI & tests to code review, QA, & deployment.

  • Documenting code & processes and identifying test, documentation, & operational coverage gaps.

• Owning technical architecture and development vision.

  • Providing the strategic vision and direction for architecture which can scale with customer growth.

  • Making business-centered development choices and making the business cases for technical investment where needed.

  • Balancing expedient development with smart management of technical debt.

• Building an excellent product which meets our clients' business needs.

  • Working closely with the Product Lead day-to-day to prioritize technical and product development.

  • Translating product requirements into implementable software choices which the team can execute.

Who you should be

We think that these are the essential skills and qualities which will help someone succeed in this role, but we may be wrong. We’re trying to hire an expert, and you may well know better than us what’s needed to deliver on the responsibilities above.

• A patient teacher. Everyone is willing to learn here; we need your expertise and experience .

• A skilled engineer. You have a solid handle on cloud infrastructure and experience in Python development and frameworks.

• A remote-first leader. You’re comfortable with remote work and understand the communications energy it takes to keep a distributed team together over Teams, Jira, & email.

• Adventuresome and ambitious. You’re excited to take on more responsibility in our startup over time.

• Growth mindset. You might have traditional education or professional certifications; you might maintain code bases and OSS projects that demonstrate your skills; you might have other ways to show that you learn and teach others.

• Glad to work with a diverse team. Your empathy extends to people whose life experiences differ greatly from your own. You might have life experiences uncommon among tech startup employees, or know what it’s like to be in the minority in tech circles. Either way, you have insights the rest of the team lacks and are ready to value their insights which wouldn’t occur to you.

Things you'll get to experience here

This is a roadmap for growth, not a list of qualifications. We do not expect you to have any or even one of these before you start. We hope you will have the opportunity pick up some or all of these during your work with us.

• Exposure to operations, strategy, sales, tech, infrastructure, UX/UI, and all the other cross-functional bits and piece of startup life.

• Broad expertise in many different fields rather than deeply investment into a single skill tree.

• Presenting on stage, working directly with customers, and engaging on a vendor floor — beyond your core work from behind a laptop.

• Thinking like a hacker and taking joy in keeping people safe because you understand that the people we’re serving have haystacks, not tech stacks.

• Familiarity with software-as-a-service products and common client expectations & needs.

• Knowledge of information security and compliance for small & medium businesses.

About Red Queen

We’re Red Queen Dynamics, Inc. [RQDI], a remote-first security SaaS startup with people in Washington, North Carolina, New Mexico, Pennsylvania, California, New Hampshire, Delhi, and more.

Red Queen Dynamics has automated and is productizing the only cybersecurity program platform for small- and mid-sized businesses and built upon lessons learned from hands-on service. Our core product is Dynah, a web application which makes it easy to assess and improve security & compliance for SMBs. We’re a small startup coming out of stealth with customers, a great team, and an amazing future.

How we work

We’re remote-first without a central office: each of us is responsible for our own workspace. Our time zones are spread among the US and India, with core meetings at the intersection (early for the US West Coast, late for India). Our remote collaboration is built around Microsoft Teams, Office 365, Jira, Confluence, and Bitbucket. Remote and semi-asynchronous collaboration means that we care more about workload than which specific hours are worked. Nonetheless, we endeavor to maintain consistent work hours and genuinely switch off at the end of the day.

Applying & expectations

Email tarah@rqdn.io with a resume or CV and (links to) applicable code samples. This will likely be a full-time equivalent 90-day contract-to-hire role with the expectation of then transitioning to a full-time employee, with applicable compensation and equity adjustment. This role is only open to US citizens, but you can be located anywhere in the world. The 90-day contract-to-hire window lets us complete whatever additional paperwork is needed to meet the administrative requirements to bring you aboard as an employee wherever you currently live.