Tuft & Needle

About Us

What we’re looking for

Full-stack, Ruby/Rails, and front-end developers

What you would work on

At a small startup, you’ll do a bit of everything. Our aim as engineers is to make everyone else’s job in the company easier. This means fast cycle time and valuable feedback and appreciation.

• Help develop and improve the front end tuftandneedle.com and our custom backend CRM
• Develop internal tools for Customer Experience, Finance, Marketing.

About the Tuft & Needle Engineering Team:

We view Tuft & Needle not as a mattress company that makes software, but as a software company that sells mattresses. We’re a small team of 4 passionate full-stack developers. We frequently seek out advice from each others and believe in continuous learning. We’re incredibly focused on results and don’t expect regular hours in the office (we have a pretty sweet office though). Although sometimes we pair program, we aren’t religious about it. We believe process should be extracted from things that are working well. We aren’t philosophically against formal scrum sprints and stand-ups, but have found our team to work well without them so far.

Our Approach:

Several months back, we sat down as an engineering team to decide on what our team values are that drive our decisions. The following are a few of these values to give a taste of what we believe as the Tuft & Needle engineering team:

Autonomy

We value new ideas and getting things done. Projects are self-selected and led.

End-to-end ownership

Each project gets an Engineering owner that is responsible for the success of the project.

Launch early and iterate

Done is often better than perfect. Although we maintain a standard of quality, we believe in getting value out of features and enhancements as soon as possible, while rapidly iterating.

Do things that don’t scale

Avoid premature optimizations: We believe that our software should automate existing manual processes to save time, rather than preempt potential needs to avoid building unnecessary software. Our litmus test for deciding on new features is “Has the team done this manually first?”. Of course, we’re pragmatic even about this value.

Pragmatism

In a growing startup, our philosophy is that it’s important to be pragmatic. We are rarely dogmatic and look to solve problems as efficiently as possible.

Our Technical Environment

Our stack consists primarily of Ruby, Rails, Postgres, Angular, CoffeeScript, HAML and SCSS running on Heroku. Our codebase has excellent test coverage and we have Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment. Refactor without fear and ship daily! We also believe in leveraging quality APIs and tools. We use and love Stripe, CircleCI, Segment, Heap Analytics and Optimizely.