EDIT: I’m not looking. This post stays here for posterity.

I’m looking for my next opportunity. Ideally, the company is in San Francisco. I’m open to remote work, but I’d much rather participate with a team directly. Here are some thoughts on what this next role looks like.

The Company

The ideal company has a fairly direct line between software shipped and revenues generated. I’m not against other business strategies, I just prefer a direct product-to-revenue approach (e.g., SAAS over social media).

The Culture

Note that when I say “culture” I mean how a company does its work. Culture is not perks, like free lunches or company values. Perks and values are important. However, how a company does its work is critical to success. See: Ben Horowitz’s The Hard Thing About Hard Things.

The right culture is important to me. In software development, culture will make or break an organization, especially in startups.

A good engineering culture looks similar to this…

• A development process that mandates transparency (think pull requests).
• Automated (or mostly-automated) deployments that treats system changes as part of the event stream.
• Frequent, small, and low-risk deployments.
• Testing discipline that values confidence over coverage.
• An operations process that treats configuration as development (DevOps).
• Product and Engineering collabarate as distinct skill-sets, but one team.

A broader company-wide culture looks like…

• Company success is made up of team, not individual, accomplishments.
• All work is defined by the value that it creates. Developing software is about solving problems more so than building solutions.
• See the needle, move the needle. Further to solving problems, value should be measurable. I believe in the tenets of The Lean Startup.
• There are no silos. Critical business information is transparent and available to all.

The Role

I’ve spent most of my career working for startups. As a result, I’m able to wear many hats, especially in small organizations. I can hire and manage new employees. I can help with the development of the product Roadmap. I can work with support to help customers through problems. While I am looking for a technical role, I have no problem doing all the other work that needs to be done.

At a high-level, I’m a full-stack Rails developer. I can manage all aspects of the Rails stack, from product features, to deployment automation, to infrastructure provisioning. My skills are largely around the backend of development. I am not a designer. While I can build a UI that works, I am not the developer that will make the UI awesome.

I’ve can also do a number of specialized things. Too many to list here, my resume has more details. Even more importantly, I’m ready to learn new things.

I tend towards a team-lead role. I’m fairly outspoken, although I do follow the rule of: “strong opinions, loosely held.” I definitely love to mentor less experienced developers, and help them level-up their skills.

The Learning Experience

The greatest thing of personal value to me is learning new things. There are two areas, specifically, that I would really like to learn more about.

Marketing and growth analytics. Sure, call this “growth-hacking”, if you want. I’m interested in learning more about it, and collaborating with a marketing team to execute growth strategies.

Quantitative analysis. Sure, call this “big-data”, if you want. I would like to expand my skills around statistics, and learn more about the programming paradigms in that space.

Contact me

If your team is expanding, and I look interesting, please get in touch. You can reach me at darren.boyd@gmail.com.

A note to recruiters: If you contact an employer regarding me without my explicit permission, I will not work with you.

A note about employment eligibility: As a Canadian, I am qualified to work in the USA through NAFTA (specifically, TN-1 status). It’s a straightforward process, with no cost and little effort required of the employer. I’ve done this a few times in the past 7 years.