Rails developer

Do you remember the last time you interacted with your local government? Was it fast and easy? Did you understand exactly what you were getting into before you started? Or was it confusing, opaque and painful?

If the latter, you're not alone. Unique limitations in the public sector have made local government one of the last industries to adopt modern technology, and as a result, the vast majority of them (40,000 in the USA alone) are still running on traditional paper-based processes.

CityGrows is the solution: We're a no-code platform for municipal governments that uses innovative pricing and implementation strategies to remove the barriers and accelerate the transition to modern digital services. If you never want to have to fill out a photocopied PDF doc to get a permit or license again, you're gonna want to join our team.

Who Should Apply?

Did you find this post after hitting PASS on the last fifteen uninspiring ad delivery / marketing / ecommerce jobs you saw and wondering why all startups feel like the same old thing? Are you looking to join an early stage company that is not only on its way to becoming the de-facto platform for interacting with local governments, but is also having a tangible positive impact on the relationship governments have with their constituents nationwide?

If so, we're looking for you.

More about us

CityGrows emerged in 2016 out of what started as a simple web scraper for local government permitting data. After winning the City of Santa Monica's "Hack the Beach" contest later that year, CityGrows went through an iteration process with the city and emerged as a full-featured platform for providing local government services.

Though the founders were based in Los Angeles at the time the company was founded, they made an early commitment to remote-first work, and have designed company practices around that commitment.  We're currently a dynamic team of 5 spread out across the US and Canada.

Work culture

As a remote team, we place a heavy emphasis on autonomy and trust. As a dev team, we collaborate in planning meetings, help each other work through hard problems and sticky situations, and regularly engage with non-technical team members to make sure the customer experience is at its best, but the bulk of our day-to-day work happens independently. We use Slack for most communications, and we avoid unnecessary meetings and try to keep things as unstructured and flexible as possible. We believe that people do their best work when they're able to do what works best for them, so you'll be free to tell us what that means to you. This affords each of us a high degree of freedom, but also requires discipline and motivation. If you're the type of person who needs a manager to hold them accountable and to focus on work, this job may not be right for you.

During non-covid times, we also plan quarterly team retreats in group-selected locations, which, in addition to being a great way to bond with your coworkers, are also pretty fun.

The job

We're looking for candidates that have experience with both React and Rails.

Beyond that, the most important thing is that you bring a skillset to the table that helps our dev cycle move faster. We're open to hearing how your skills can help. Two things that would be particularly helpful on our team right now would be either:

  • A strong back-end candidate who enjoys digging deep into the stack to work out bottlenecks, optimize, and support our growing user-base
  • A strong front-end candidate with an eye for design knack for developing high-quality, brand-appropriate, visually consistent  interface elements on the fly, and who can take ownership over maintaining a strong visual identity in the product

If either of these sound like you, or if you think your skills could be useful in some other way, please do not hesitate to reach out.

Benefits

While we acknowledge we can't compete with the perks offered by mature tech companies, we can offer a few things they can't:

  • A real equity stake in a company poised to own an enormous, untapped market
  • The opportunity to grow rapidly into a leadership role

We also offer

  • Paid vacation (we don't count days, but most of us tend to take 2-3 weeks)
  • Health insurance stipend

How to apply

Send over a brief note to dev@citygro.ws with:

  1. Something you've made or contributed to
  2. Something you're particularly good at
  3. A brief comment on what interests you about CityGrows
  4. Something that interests you outside of work