Keeper (YC S21) is hiring engineers to build a personal accountant for everyone

Full Stack Engineer (San Francisco or Remote)

$120K – $180K / 0.05% – 0.35%

Call it the gig economy, the passion economy, or side hustles, over half of Gen Z workers are now getting paid with 1099 contracts. Tax law is complicated, and many freelancers are overwhelmed. They can’t afford a personal bookkeeper, and don’t have time to dig into the details of what counts as a write-off. As a result, they’re leaving thousands of dollars on the table at tax time.

Keeper’s mission is to fix this by providing everyone with a personal accountant. Keeper understands all the minutiae of tax law, responds in minutes instead of days, and creates a personalized tax filing experience for each user based on the forms they upload.

Users love our product! Here are some recent customer quotes (Jan 2024):

Caitlin holds my hand throughout this process, and I’m not good with taxes and its lingo. She is quick to respond and has pleasant messages as well.

This app made finding write-offs so straightforward … Other apps seemed so nebulous that I wasn’t sure if I was allowed to claim what I was claiming. The fact that it’s reviewed by tax experts gives me peace of mind.

You can read more on the App Store.

What you could be working on

• Context-based intelligence: When users ask Keeper a question, we want to give answers related to the screen the user is on, and we want to link users to different actions and different parts of the app.
• Income tracking: We should be able to monitor and predict income as well as expenses. This will help users get a full picture of the accounting side of their business, and will give us a key piece to predicting the user’s April tax bill.
• Quarterly taxes: Freelancers are supposed to set aside and pay taxes every quarter, based on their income that quarter. This is a manual task that differs by state and sometimes requires mailing a physical form. We’d like to enable users to pay us to do this for them.

Engineering at Keeper

Here’s the type of engineer who will thrive at Keeper.

• You want a lot of autonomy, and are able to produce great results independently. At Keeper, you own your roadmap, you own your features end-to-end (from brainstorming with PM to publishing in the App Store), and you have significant autonomy over technical decisions.
• You are product-focused and user-focused. We use React, Node, and SQL because they’re standard. I want our biggest problems to be related to figuring out what to build and what user pain points to focus on, not figuring out the technology.
• You enjoy helping others. You help engineers debug tricky issues, brainstorm new features with PM, and help customer support when they surface issues with our systems.

One way to understand these values is to see them as a set of contrasts.

• Autonomy: It’s on you to hold yourself to a high bar, push yourself to go fast, and push yourself to be a craftsperson with code. If you aren’t self-motivated to do these things, Keeper may not be a good fit.
• Product focus: While we make time for new technologies and refactoring, it’s not a major focus, and is primarily driven by product need.
• Collaboration: While there may be dedicated roles for x-functional communication at other orgs (e.g., PMs or tech leads), at Keeper, engineers work directly with stakeholders. This puts more responsibility on the engineer to be responsive to stakeholders.

Responsibilities

• Collaborate with PM to come up with new features and new ways to solve problems we’ve discovered
• Ship features using React, Node, and SQL. While we use React Native on mobile, React Native experience isn’t required
• Test your code (both manually and automatically), and monitor it in production
• Teach other engineers about systems and technologies you know really well, and learn from other engineers when ramping up on new systems and technologies

We want the interview process to be representative of the work you’ll be doing. Overall, we want to develop high conviction of fit. First, we want to know that we’re a great opportunity for you, both in terms of our business opportunity and in terms of your career development. Second, we want to know if you’ll be a great fit for our needs, which are particularly focused on shipping product fast.

1. Quick call with Matt (hiring manager and CTO) (30 min): I’ll pitch you on Keeper, and we’ll talk about why you why you want to join, and how you want to contribute.
2. Technical round 1 (45 min): You’ll implement a new feature in an open source React library.
3. Technical round 2 (3 x 45 min): You’ll solve customer problems with React, JS, and SQL, and you’ll brainstorm a new feature with PM.
4. CEO 1-1 (30 min): Paul (our cofounder and CEO) will review our mission and vision with you, and will also evaluate culture fit.
5. References

Keeper