Engineering Principles & Values

• Code quality standards (testing, documentation, review process)
  • Crafted not cobbled: Your code should feel
  • Always leave the codebase cleaner than when you started
• Technical decision-making philosophy (build vs buy, tech debt approach)
  • Build: core differentiators and anything that's 80% of a solution for 20% effort OR open source solution that can be easily deployed on railway
  • Buy: solved problems (auth, payments, monitoring) unless it's our core value prop
• Ownership and accountability expectations
  • You ship it - you own it

Development Process

• Sprint/development cycle structure
  • 1 week sprint
  • We use linear for tracking, must watch → https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Q5BoiIFBiY
  • Demo on friday, plan on monday
• Task assignment and prioritization
  • CTO assigns based on capacity and growth goals
  • All tasks are managed through Linear
• Definition of done
  • Code reviewed and approved
  • Tested locally + any automated tests pass
  • Deployed to staging
  • Documentation updated if needed
• Code review requirements and SLAs
  • Reviews within 4 business hours for small PRs (<200 lines)
  • Within 1 day for larger PRs
  • Block calendar if you need deep focus time
• Deployment process and who approves releases
  • All deploys go through CTO initially (will change after ramp period)
  • Deploy to staging → then production

Technical Stack & Architecture

• Current tech stack and why we chose it
  • We use Railway for infra | Cloudflare for DNS | Nextjs for client layer | Python for backend (subject to change)
• Architecture decisions and patterns we follow
  • Doc → MVP → QA → Prod

Communication & Collaboration

• Daily/weekly rituals (standups, syncs)
  • We keep meetings to a minimum, but on the engineering side we hold two fixed sessions: one on Monday to assign tickets and plan the week, and another on Friday to review progress and debrief.
• Async communication expectations (Slack response times, documentation)
  • We expect all engineers to be available on slack 24/7 barring religious exceptions
• How we handle blockers and escalations
  • All eng/product blockers will be escalated and resolved by CTO

Growth & Learning

• Onboarding timeline and expectations
  • We expecting you to be merging to prod and taking on tickets within 7 days
• Performance feedback cadence
  • Quarterly written feedback