Lead Full-Stack Engineer at Roame | Y Combinator
About Roame Roame is a flight and hotel search engine for points and miles. Booking business or first class with points instead of cash saves travelers thousands of dollars on a single trip. The hard part is finding the seats. Award space is scattered across dozens of airline and hotel programs, it moves constantly, and the best deals get taken. Doing it by hand means hours across a dozen browser tabs, and often days. Roame finds those deals in seconds. Members also book hotels through us and get our commission rebated back to them immediately. Roame was founded by Tim and Zi. Tim spent the previous decade covering consumer and travel companies on the hedge fund side. Zi ran data encryption systems at Airbnb. We started Roame after losing dozens of hours hunting for first class award space to Asia across a dozen browser tabs. Award travel is a data problem. Humans shouldn’t have to solve it by hand. Why join Roame now? - Profitable. We run on revenue, not runway. We can start multi year technical work and actually finish it. - Loved product. We’re the default tool for a lot of the points and miles community, and our users are vocal about it. - Scope. This is the top engineering role at the company. There is no larger org above it. - AI native. A large share of our engineering is agent assisted and our whole workflow is built around it. About the role - Own engineering at Roame. You would be the most senior engineer here, reporting to the founders. - Set technical direction across our Go backend and web app. We also ship a native iOS app, and every API decision has an iOS client on the other end of it. You need to account for that, not build it. - Finish our move to a modern Go service architecture and retire what’s left of the old one. - Own correctness where money moves: booking, checkout, payments. - Set the engineering bar on testing, review, documentation, and hiring. - Grow into the senior most technical role at the company as we scale. How we work - Write it down before building it. Specs and architecture live in the repo. - Test first. Most work starts from a written test plan. - Ship in small increments. Days, not sprints. - Nothing waits until tomorrow if it can go out today. - Disagree out loud, early, to the person. Then pick something and move. - No task is beneath anyone. - Spoon feed yourself, learning is free, generate a video from the code and learn it Your first 90 days - Week 1. Ship something to production. Small is fine. Nobody here spends a week reading code before they touch it. - Day 30. You own a meaningful piece of the booking and checkout path and have shipped a significant update to it. - Day 60. You own the migration plan. Your sequencing, your call on what gets cut. - Day 90. A major piece of our legacy architecture is retired, and you know exactly what it takes to finish off the rest. On AI We use it constantly and we want someone who loves it as much as we do. AI writes great code and it writes bad code, sometimes in the same file. Getting the good version every time is the actual skill, and it’s the one we’re hiring for. Knowing what to specify up front. Knowing when a human has to stay in the loop. Knowing when to throw the output away instead of patching it. Building the guardrails that make good output the default instead of the lucky case. Our habits around specs and tests exist because they’re what make agent assisted work trustworthy at speed. What we’re looking for - 4 to 6+ years of engineering experience, post-grad - Confident you’re a 10x engineer, and able to tell us why. - Strong in Go and comfortable in TypeScript. Mobile experience isn’t required, but you should think in terms of a mobile client when you design an API. - You’ve owned a system and answered for it when it broke, you understand resilience - You’ve finished a hard migration, not just started one. - You’ve shipped code that moved real money. - Opinions about how engineering teams should run that stuck somewhere before. - You want to lead without giving up writing code. - You understand distributed engineering - You understand that this is a living, breathing system; hours keep it moving; this isn’t a 40 hours a week job Probably not a fit - You want every day to be greenfield. This is a three year old codebase with real debt. - You’d rewrite before you understand. - You need priorities handed to you. - You cannot distinguish between slop and non-slop. - You’re comfortable letting something sit until next sprint. - You bite off more than you can chew; unable to strategically land impact and releases. - You have a general disinterest for travel - You’re easily frustrated by hard problems Technology Go, TypeScript, React, Next.js, Postgres, Protobuf. Swift on iOS, which you won’t be expected to write. $175-250k base depending on experience and location in the US 0.5%-2% equity
