Software Engineer

What we do: Hi, we're SnailBot! Our hands-free cloud service helps people buy the most sought-after items when they restock. At the click of a button, users can choose to buy video game consoles, computer graphics cards, and hundreds of other items, and our 24/7 automation will try to purchase them on their behalf the next time they restock on a retail site.

Who we are: We're a small team of ex-FAANG engineers who were frustrated with how hard it was to get in-demand items that sell out in seconds. We started SnailBot in 2020 so regular people don't have to miss out on their favorite items even if they're busy with work, school, or living life.

Our impact: Over 10,000 parents, busy professionals, small businesses, and more have already used SnailBot to purchase $145M worth of exclusive items across 244,000+ checkouts in 2021, and this is just the beginning! Just this past Black Friday week, we were able to help over a thousand parents get a PS5 at MSRP for their kids, and many of them were 40-year-old moms who never used anything like this before! This was covered on WSJ and Business Insider.

Ethics: We understand the controversial nature of bots and only purchase luxury items and never human necessities. We're at the forefront of what inevitably has become the new age of eCommerce - one where only bots can compete for the most sought-after items. We want to help even the playing field. Up to this point, most bots were only accessible to the tech-savvy, but SnailBot makes it so easy that anyone can have a fighting chance at purchasing their favorite products.

Why you should join us 😃 : We believe bots will become a mainstream tool within the next few years, and we truly think this is the most exciting time to join us when the space is still young. You have the opportunity to learn and work with cutting-edge automation and make a huge and immediate impact to our 10k+ customers in a super tight feedback loop (we're all on a Discord server together so interacting with customers is instantaneous).

Do you love the challenge of cat and mouse games? We play two games:

1. A game against retail sites: we're constantly adapting to evade their ever-changing bot defenses.
2. A game against other bots: we're always optimizing our methods to beat other bots. Milliseconds decide whether we successfully purchase an item or not when thousands of other people are going for the same item.

We're looking for someone who can thrive in such a highly dynamic and challenging environment!

• Experience with or willingness to learn Typescript & Node.js.
• Experience designing, implementing, testing, and maintaining non-trivial systems.
• Experience with using logs, metrics, and alarms for observability.
• Knowledge of how the web works (HTTP/TLS, headers, cookies, user agents, client-side script execution).
• Experience inspecting HTTP requests (e.g. with tools like Chrome DevTools, Fiddler, Charles, Wireshark, etc).

• Strong work ethic and unrelenting attitude toward solving hard and ambiguous problems, even if it takes endless trial and error. Cat and mouse games are not easy. We need to constantly adapt to deliver the best customer experience.
• Extremely detail-oriented with a knack for first-principles thinking and questioning all assumptions.
• Loves to wear many hats, even if they don't fit at first.
• Demonstrates ownership and leadership for everything they touch.
• Quick learner who requires minimal hand-holding.
• Thrives in a high-paced, highly iterative environment.
• Moves fast but is a perfectionist in areas that matter.
• Understands the importance of design before implementation.
• Intrinsically motivated to build a great product that customers will love.
• Good human.

• Experience with reverse engineering websites/apps and deobfuscating code.
• Experience with bypassing anti-bot protections.
• Golang, Python, C++, native addons, AWS, Docker, CI/CD, React, observability platforms.

Although you'll wear many hats, here are some areas you'll work on. Don't worry if you don't have experience with everything here. We do a lot of niche stuff not found anywhere else, so we expect you to learn on the job.

Automation & Reverse Engineering

• Build and maintain robust automation for interacting with retail sites (e.g. purchasing an item, scraping for in-stock status) by sending HTTP requests from code and using browser automation tools like Playwright, Selenium, etc.
• Research and experiment with HTTP endpoints of retail sites and mobile apps to find novel methods of interaction (e.g. you may find that a retailer's mobile app uses an HTTP endpoint that is faster at adding an item to cart than the desktop site).
• Discover ways to bypass various levels of bot protection. This could involve mimicking human behavior in an automated fashion, tweaking our HTTP requests, building a solution to solve captchas, deobfuscating anti-bot JS to understand what they're looking for, and much more.

Observability & Maintenance

• Instrument code with metrics & logs and create alarms so we're alerted when something breaks (e.g. when a retail site changes a page that breaks our automation, we need to fix it soon).
• Regularly audit performance metrics and implement optimizations when needed.

Services, Scaling, and Deployment

• Designing and building scalable services and tooling to satisfy a wide range of internal and customer needs.
• Write and deploy scalable code to large fleets of distributed servers.

Customer Features

• Add customer-facing features to make their lives easier (e.g. ability to check their order history right from our dashboard, etc).
• Talk to customers in a tight feedback loop (we have a Discord server with 10k+ paying customers)

Misc

• Participate in code reviews to ensure high code quality and to help your teammates and yourself improve.
• Help hire the best people.
• Question assumptions wherever you go.
• ...and so much more.

There are so many things we can do to deliver more value to our customers and grow the company. You have the opportunity to learn and work on many different areas (even non-engineering stuff if you want to) and make a huge and immediate impact.

• Competitive salary, comprehensive health insurance (medical/dental/vision), 401k.
• $2000 annual budget to help you buy a new laptop, set up your home office, or invest in your own development and well-being.
• 100% remote: we've always been a fully distributed team and we trust you to get your work done wherever, whenever.
• Flexible work hours: you have the freedom to set up a work schedule that works best for you.
• Flexible paid time off: take the time off you need to bring your best self to work.
• Work with a small team of highly competent, passionate, and egoless engineers.
• Opportunity to wear many hats and grow, lead, and massively influence the company.

SnailBot provides equal work opportunities to all team members and applicants and prohibits discrimination and harassment of any type without regard to race, color, religion, age, sex (including pregnancy), national origin, disability status, genetics, protected veteran status, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, or any other characteristic protected by federal, state, or local laws.

• While we offer a flexible work arrangement with no core hours, expect an average full-time commitment of 40 hours per week.
• A successful candidate will be subject to a background check and must receive satisfactory results as a condition for joining the team.
• A successful candidate will also be required to sign a non-disclosure agreement (NDA).
• By applying for this role, you confirm that all information submitted is accurate and complete. You further acknowledge that providing false or fraudulent information during the application process is cause for denial of an offer, revocation of any existing offer, or other adverse action, up to and including termination after the start of your commencement of work.

Please see above.