Software Developer

Vessel is hiring Software Developers of all levels to join a small and capable team of builders working on a cloud-based fintech web app. Tech includes TypeScript, SvelteKit, Node, Nix, Docker, Terraform, and AWS.

What we do

There’s a fast growing demand for investments in private funds (private equity, venture capital, etc.) coinciding with a wave of democratization for these investments, but there’s still too much friction in the investment experience. Interactions between fund managers and their investors happen on too many different platforms (e.g., datarooms, investor portals, online document signing software, etc.) that look like they were built in the 90s and don’t speak with each other. Seasoned institutional investors are unimpressed and investors that are new to private markets are overwhelmed by the investment process. Fundraising is hard enough and few fund managers want to spend millions to build custom software or hire armies of investor relations professionals to chase after investors.

Vessel was built by former private market investors and fund managers (from firms such as Inovia Capital, Teralys Capital and Power Sustainable) that have been very successful at fundraising and managing investor relations. Our mission is to make investing in private funds easy (almost as easy as investing in a stock on Wealthsimple) and make fundraising less painful. We’re a white-label SaaS platform for fund managers and investor relations teams to wow investors and manage all parts of the relationship with investors, from marketing an investment opportunity to onboarding investors, and sharing news and financial reports.

Vessel has already helped fund managers close tens of millions of dollars, grown more than 20x since last year and signed some of the most well-established fund managers in the industry.

Our team is nimble, we’re growing fast, and we’ve built something that people love. We’re making money and are well‑funded (backed by some top investors).

About the work

You’ll be working on features such as identity verification, website builders, scheduled payment collection, and electronic document signing. That’s just to name a few. Vessel is a SaaS. We build tools so that our customers – other businesses – can delight their own customers. And our bar is high. Our customers require a wide range of tools to help them market a fund, invite broad networks of investors, manage and sign contracts, and eventually collect many millions of dollars of funds from their investors.

Vessel is young and very well capitalized. Right now, early customers and feedback have given us strong conviction in our vision and you will be building the aforementioned products with us. A lot of features exist, and a lot more features need to be created. You’ll be writing code and designing features with the CTO, 5 developers, and a product designer.

Writing is important. Both technical and product, we write our ideas down and critique them. Ultimately you’re working to solve our customers' problems. The team is composed of product-minded developers and you are expected to contribute beyond code.

We’re all‑in on SvelteKit for the web app and Node for the backend. We use protobuf as our IDL between the two layers. You’ll be writing it all in TypeScript, covering it with automated testing, and continuously deploying it to AWS via pipelines we’ve built ourselves. We love Managed Relational Databases and leveraging various encryption mechanisms to ensure the safety and security of our customers' very sensitive information.

Most of your time will be spent on the above. Sometimes things go wrong and production bugs happen. Usually it’s not an issue and we don’t expect perfection. But when dealing with customer money, even a visual bug can cause customers stress. So part of this job means making a big deal out of small problems to retain customer trust. You will occasionally be on‑call which might mean getting woken up at midnight to fix things when it’s your turn.

If you’ve read Shape Up or Mythical Man Month, and you liked the surgical team or really want to work in cycles, you’ll fit right in here. You will work with a small and capable team across software, product, finance, and ops to build the right product. We don’t work in sprints. We don’t collect daily updates of everything you did yesterday. We work in highly autonomous, outcome‑focused cycles that last multiple weeks. We do not wait for minutiae to be clarified. We instead drive to solutions by acting in the best interest of the company and the customer.

After every cycle is a cooldown week. You will spend this week taking strategic technical decisions on your own. Nobody will assign you tasks. You are expected to surface important problems and fix them yourself.

About you

Vessel is looking to add one software developer to the team. Everyone on the team