I'm into my eighth week as Head of Engineering at ForUsAll. The dust is still settling around me, but I thought I'd take a moment to explain why I decided to make this move and why it fits in with the personal mission that's guided my work so far.
If you visit the ForUsAll website, it'll tell you about affordable 401k retirement plans. There's a deeper story here: ForUsAll is a financial wellness startup, which hopes to help everyone build a stronger financial base. In a world where there's an ever-widening gap between the rich and poor, and where almost nobody has enough money to have a safe retirement or to buy a house, that's important. Most financial products are aimed at people on higher incomes, or who work for Fortune 500 companies. Just about everyone else is underserved. And just setting aside the money for more than hand to mouth expenses can be really hard.
ForUsAll is a Series B company that is still evolving. Right now, providing easier retirement savings is a good place to start. By making it more affordable for small businesses to provide retirement benefits, we make those benefits more accessible to a wider set of people. Because those benefits often include matching contributions from employers, we help people to save a little bit more. And with every paycheck we sent a "you got paid" email that helps people to manage their finances with clarity - and helps more people participate in their retirement savings plan.
It's my first fintech company, but behind the scenes the principles are similar to best-practice engineering work I did at companies like Medium. It's all about building something that scales, is easily maintainable, has an excellent CI/CD pipeline, and treats personal data with an abundance of care, caution, and hardened information security. (The piece that goes a little bit above and beyond is that then we get externally audited to make sure we're doing the right things.)
It's also the most diverse engineering team I've ever had the pleasure of working on. I feel privileged to be serving these incredible individuals, and to be helping to grow an empathetic, inclusive culture.
You should join us.
I'm still looking for a few people to join me at our office in downtown San Francisco. The downside is you'll need to work in close proximity to me; the upsides are a healthy set of startup perks and the satisfaction of doing work that really matters. In particular, I'm looking for:
A Front-End (React, Redux) Engineer
A Back-End (Ruby on Rails) Engineer
If that's you, you should apply - and/or send me an email. I'd love to chat about the roles, or about any aspect of this work.
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