Soma Capital Portfolio Jobs

Lead Engineer—Backend

Sora ID

Sora ID

Software Engineering
New York, NY, USA · Remote
Posted on Thursday, January 19, 2023
Who we are:
Sora is a platform for individuals to cryptographically prove their identities online in a more secure, privacy-preserving, and inclusive way. We’re a seed-stage startup out of Stanford and are backed by some of the original investors in Facebook, Stripe, and Airbnb, among many other category-defining companies.
The opportunity:
$200B is lost to ecommerce fraud annually. Three million Americans have their worlds turned upside down by identity theft every year. Our goal is to eliminate antiquated secret-based authentication such as passwords and social security numbers—which causes much of this fraud—and become a universal digital identity credential, modernizing verification on the internet.
Sora is an equal opportunity employer dedicated to building a diverse community inclusive of those with every background and perspective. We strongly encourage members of underrepresented communities to apply—as an identity company, a wide range of perspectives is crucial to achieving our mission.

What we value:

  • Integrity: we want to do this the right way, building a company that can serve as a model for others and constantly reviewing our impact
  • Honesty and open communication: we have a feedback culture that prioritizes helping everyone succeed
  • Intention: being thoughtful, methodical, and always keeping in mind our North Star of building a 10x better paradigm for online identity
  • Positivity: work should be fun; we build each other up and always have each others’ backs
  • Humility: we are cognizant of the unknown unknowns; we’re smart and driven, but prioritize listening and learning to achieve our vision

What you’ll do:

  • There are two parts of our product. Business customers integrate our user-facing identity verification flow via SDKs and APIs into their applications to prevent fraud or comply with regulations. They then use our dashboard to customize the branding or decisioning process, analyze metrics, and review potentially fraudulent cases. Both are implemented in React with a Python/FastAPI backend, served from GCP. We’re looking for help building out features to make our platform more flexible and scalable as we rapidly grow the number of customers.
  • Architect and build new features
  • You’ll work on features from beginning to end, including initial product experience design to technical architecture to testing and deployment. This might mean getting on a Slack channel with our customers or getting your hands dirty and writing critical code when needed. Since we’re a small team, attention to detail and a clear vision of the end product are very important.
  • Own infrastructure
  • You’ll improve performance and developer efficiency by optimizing our architecture on GCP, improving CI/CD, and working with our security engineers to ensure our system is airtight, especially on the infrastructure layer.
  • Fix bugs
  • Bugs are often not obvious and difficult to reproduce. Fixing them requires broad and deep knowledge of the codebase. You will be crucial to keeping things running smoothly!
  • Support the team
  • You’ll provide talented engineers the guidance and support they need, whether it’s through careful and thoughtful code reviews, weekly 1:1 feedback sessions, or mentorship. You'll help out where you can with operations, think Retool dashboards, customer onboarding, and engineering processes.

Who you are:

  • You communicate effectively and incorporate feedback quickly
  • You are enthusiastic about mentoring motivated younger engineers and driving/improving our hiring process
  • You sweat the important details required to build a polished product
  • You identify valuable projects and execute on them autonomously

Experience:

  • 4+ years of experience building significant projects
  • BS in Computer Science or related field, or equivalent experience
  • Technical credibility: Python, GCP/AWS and Docker, code review

Bonus:

  • Experience in high-growth, product-driven companies
  • Experience building full-stack projects
  • Knowledge of web security principles, attacks (XSS, CSRF, etc), and how to defend against them
  • If you could see yourself at Sora but don’t check every box, apply anyway!
    We cannot sponsor visas right now.

What working with us will look like:

  • Valued input in every conversation and every room
  • Opportunities for accelerated career growth and advancement

Benefits and Perks

  • Competitive compensation with a significant equity grant
  • Unlimited PTO and location flexibility: in-person in NYC, hybrid, or remote
  • Health, vision, and dental insurance
  • 401(k) with match
  • Free food in the office and free dinners when working anywhere
  • Free unlimited cloud backup for personal computers