Senior Full-Stack Growth Engineer at The Juggernaut (W19)
The media company and community for the South Asia-curious
New York, NY
Full-time
About The Juggernaut

The Juggernaut is a NY-based subscription media company and community for the South Asia-curious. Targeted subscription media is a valuable bet: Black Entertainment Television (BET) sold to Viacom for $2.3b in 2000 and Liberty Media valued Univision at $14b in 2017. The U.S. South Asia diaspora alone has $460b of spending power and is the fastest growing demographic in the U.S., yet is underserved. We're backed by some incredible investors, including Precursor Ventures (also in The Athletic, Superhuman), Kevin Lin (co-founder, Twitch), Adam Hansmann (co-founder, The Athletic), and Balaji Srinivasan (ex-Coinbase CTO, ex-GP a16z).

About the role

The Juggernaut is a new type of media company that uses ambitious journalism to tell diverse stories about South Asia and the diaspora. We're headquartered in New York and backed by great investors including Y Combinator, Precursor Ventures, Twitch co-founder Kevin Lin, The Athletic co-founder Adam Hansmann, and ex-Coinbase CTO Balaji Srinivasan. 

Business Insider just named us one of the top media companies to watch in 2020. More about us in Axios, NiemanLab, TechCrunch, HBS MBA blog, Poynter, Cheddar, CNBC, and Forbes.

The opportunity

We’re looking for a growth engineer to help build, deliver, and iterate on a beautiful, high quality experience for our customers and potential customers. Since we are a subscription-driven business, your goal will be to help optimize the customer acquisition funnel at every step to drive awareness, conversion, engagement, retention, and virality — accounting for scale, performance, and getting things done. You are exceptional at translating business and product goals into software that just works.

Our tech stack

We use Contentful as our CMS, Stripe as our payments processor, Postgres for our database, and Next.js for our frontend (React). There are many more components but you will also have a role in modifying our tech stack as we grow.

Some of the problems you'll be solving:

  • Implement best-in-class analytics to measure product performance and user engagement
  • Pay back some of our tech debt, but figure out what tech debt we can get away with, to be tackled later, vs. what is mission critical
  • Finalize our app and app launch strategy
  • Improve subscriber conversion, engagement, retention, and virality; create a process for continuously improving each element 
  • Work with SEO partners and architect our CMS to improve content discovery
  • Build out community features
  • Document product decisions to ensure we have a record of our technical / product playbook and learnings
  • Participate in interviewing and hiring, influencing team culture
  • Help define the product roadmap and build out additional products beyond our core web site and app

Who we’re looking for:

  • You are an experienced software engineer with proficiency in modern web development frameworks
  • You have strong product instincts — you may already have strong business instincts but also want to hone the business side (as it relates to customer engagement and growth)
  • You are comfortable measuring the "ROI" of product decisions and prioritizing tasks based on impact
  • You have an eye for user-centric design, and can improve UI/UX — you are comfortable helping shape design decisions
  • You collaborate well with non-technical teams and communicate clearly
  • You write clean, maintainable, scalable code and develop, test, and iterate quickly
  • You are eager to grow and help others grow, and know when to bring in help
  • You can balance perfection with getting things done
  • You are comfortable with dissent and disagreement and bring informed opinions to the table

What it’s like to work at The Juggernaut:

  • You are ambitious — A famous story goes: two different groups were told to build a bridge out of index cards and paper clips. One group was told to build a bridge 15 inches high, another 21 inches high. The 15-inch group ultimately built a bridge 17 inches high, but the 21-inch group built a bridge that was 20 inches high — three inches taller with the same materials. Even if you’re a bit shy of your ultimate, ambitious target, you can often push yourself further than you think. 
  • You have taste — You are an expert in your domain and read and practice a lot so you know what great looks like. For example, our editors constantly read great writers and books. Even if they can’t articulate exactly why something isn’t working, they can smell it and can work towards getting there. Equally, they know when something is exceptional.
  • You are context- and data-driven — Even if certain solutions worked before, you think about the context and the data you have and how that might prove/disprove your hypothesis. Many times at The Juggernaut, we’ve found that pre-existing assumptions about how to run ads or what articles will do well don’t always hold out. Our customers are always surprising us — so unearth the context (and the data) first.
  • You are reliable and nail the details when they matter  You get things done when you say you will. And if you can’t, you communicate what’s going on. Don’t be a bottleneck for team members. You also nail the details when they matter — ensuring that our site doesn’t go down, for example — but also are open to experimentation when stakes are lower.
  • You don't miss the forest for the trees. That is, you keep the big picture in mind as you make decisions. You know that it's not about saying yes to everything, but about knowing whether you're solving the right problem at the right time.

We started The Juggernaut because we were tired of reductive South Asian storylines. If you're someone who wants to redefine what a 21st century media company and community looks like, do reach out.

Technology

We are looking for our first full-stack engineer to help take us to the next level, from a newsletter to a South Asia-focused media giant, using the power of software and data. Depending on experience and milestones, the role could transition into that of CTO or Head of Product and Technology.

Building a media company is difficult. Building a media company powered by subscription and having your customers open up their wallets means building an excellent user experience and getting the stories right. We are looking for someone who can test and iterate quickly. We are looking for someone who can define our initial tech stack and architecture for a paywall-powered media platform (and, eventually, an app). You will build the tools to improve user engagement across platforms (newsletter, social media, site, etc.) to help build and grow a thriving online and offline community. You will help build the tools that allow us to quickly understand which stories are worth covering or curating, as well as identifying potential contributors. You will help build the elements of a successful, innovative referral program.

The interesting problems to solve include: what subscription offer can lead to the highest conversion, what paywall best balances user engagement with revenue (absolute paywall, a few free articles, locked articles), which platforms (newsletter, site, social) will drive the highest engagement.

Other jobs at The Juggernaut

fulltimeNew York, NYFull Stack

fulltimeNew York, NYFull Stack

Hundreds of YC startups are hiring on Work at a Startup.

Sign up to see more ›