Clever Real Estate is hiring a remote Fullstack Engineer

Hi Dev community!

My name is Dan Isaza, and I'm the VP of Engineering at Clever Real Estate.

Our Engineering team is hiring two Fullstack Engineers. (remote)

Below, I'll share a few things about the company and the position.

If you're interested, please reach out to me: dan@movewithclever.com

How does Clever make money?

We connect customers to real estate agents and help them save money in the process (sellers get a discount on commission, buyers get a rebate on their home purchase). When a customer buys/sells a home, we get a percentage of the real estate agent's revenue in exchange for having sent them the customer.

What makes Clever unique? (What is defensible?)

Our "secret sauce" has two parts and is centered around providing a seamless customer experience.

Our Secret Sauce Recipe

• Our in-house Concierge Team provides a seamless customer experience that our competitors simply don't have.
• Our proprietary technology allows our Concierge Team to provide this seamless experience at scale.

In that way, we're a lot like StitchFix. They have amazing stylists, and they have lots of tech and automation behind the scenes that allows them to scale the experience. We apply the same ideas to matching our customers with the right real estate agent.

The Concierge Team

Before being matched with agents, customers talk to folks on the Concierge Team. These folks are a resource for answering customer questions about real estate and setting expectations about the home buying / selling process.

There's a lot of regulation about what can and cannot be said to customers about real estate (especially around commissions), so each concierge has to become a licensed real estate agent themselves. There's no way around it: that's a lot of work. We do it, and our competitors don't. As a result, we can provide a much better experience to our customers.

The Technology: Our proprietary Agent Matching Platform (AMP⚡)

We believe that every homeowner's situation is unique and deserves the attention of a trained and caring concierge. We also believe in the power of technology to augment our team's abilities.

With our Agent Matching Platform (or AMP) at their sides, our Concierge Team can quickly and easily navigate thousands of data points about the 8K real estate agents on our platform.

The goal is not to automate the Concierge experience, but rather: to scale it through the use of technology.

Our customers love our Concierge Team, and the AMP allows lets us deliver this high-touch experience to thousands of customers with a relatively small in-house team.

What is Clever's current financial position? How have we prepared for COVID?

We believe in transparency and regularly discuss this question with our team (every 6 weeks). We go over: How much money is in the bank? How much do we make each month? How much do we spend?

I'll hold off on posting more details in this public post, but I'm happy to share more details over the phone, including specific steps we took to prepare for COVID and the effect that it's had on our revenue.

How has COVID affected home sales?

We talk to our customers and agents regularly to get a sense for this.

Here's what we're seeing:

• Folks meet with their real estate agents over zoom
• Buyers use video walkthroughs or 3d-tours (where available) to whittle down the list of houses they're interested in
• In-person showings are only done if folks are very serious about buying. Showings are private (rather than in big groups), and folks keep a distance / wear masks.

In addition to this, we believe that any longer-term market downturn will encourage consumers to seek out savings. We offer some of the largest savings in the industry and believe that this will be a big advantage if there is a long-term economic downturn.

What are your values?

We are a highly collaborative team that values pair-programming, a growth mindset, and end-to-end ownership of initiatives.

We value learning together. We regularly teach each other new things through Learning Sessions.

We believe that engineering is a team sport. We all participate in DevOps, and we strive to eliminate "single points of failure" by sharing context. We don't like "hero ball"; instead, we prefer to tackle problems together.

We have a culture of blame-free continuous improvement.

Here's an excerpt from our Blameless Post-Mortem template:

(Much of this wording is taken directly from The Devops Handbook)

Remember: We're trying to prepare for a future where we're as humanly fallible as we are today. It's not productive for us to come out of this meeting with a decision to "be less stupid" or "be more careful". Rather, we should try to identify fool-proof countermeasures that we can use to avoid issues in the future. This may involve an automated system or a documented process that captures organizational learning.

We should explicitly disallow the phrases "would have" and "could have". It's much more productive to think about why we chose a course of action and what we'll do in the future to improve our incident prevention and response practices.

Finally, remember that this meeting is not about naming, blaming, or shaming others. It's about improving ourselves as a team.

What's the current state of the Engineering team?

The whole team is currently four people (myself included). Two folks build and maintain our customer-facing website. Two people (myself included) build and maintains the AMP.

We're looking for two more people to join us in building the AMP.

Our engineers take ownership of creating their own technical specs, and they collaborate a lot with each other and with product stakeholders. As a small team, we have a lot of personal ownership over the planning process.

We regularly reflect on what's working and what's not, and we adjust our processes accordingly.

Oh, also: we're remote! Each engineer is in a different location, and all company meetings are done remote-first. (i.e. everyone on their own laptop, even if they're sitting in the same office).

The total company size is 25 people, with about half of those in our HQ office in St. Louis. The rest are remote. 😄

What are you hiring for? Looking for?

We're looking for a fullstack contributor to help us continue building and maintaining our Agent Matching Platform.

We are looking for someone who values collaboration and has strong communication skills.

Our ideal engineer is someone who enjoys pair programming, thinking through decisions together, and breaking down problems to solve them iteratively.

If you have experience with Django and/or React, that's great! If not, that's okay.

Our onboarding process involves a lot of pairing, so we'll get you up to speed on our tech stack.

We're interested in mid-level or senior engineers.

If you or someone you know might be a fit, please reach out! 😄

You can reach me at:
dan@movewithclever.com

P.S.

At this time we are only considering candidates based in the US or Canada.