Wealthfront Blog

Grand Rounds | Lead Front-End Engineer | San Francisco, CA USA | https://www.grandrounds.com

Grand Rounds[1] was recently named Best Digital Health Company to Work For[2] by Rock Health, and is currently recognized by Glassdoor's as the #2 Best Places to Work[3].
We are also represented on Wealthfront's Career Launching Companies[4] for the second year in a row and are looking for talented Software Engineers to join our mission.

For this particular opening, we're looking for an experienced React Engineer to join our growing team. You'll leverage your skills in a fast pace environment to help us deliver the next generation of our mobile applications as well as be a key contributor in the standardization of front end components and application services.

We're building on the modern ecosystem of JavaScript technologies. You'll be immersed with ReactJS, ReactNative, Redux, GraphQL, Jest, Yarn, and will have the autonomy to help shape the toolchain. The team you'll join is comprised of 3 other software engineers, a test engineer, product manager, designer, and a UX/UI researcher. We have clear business goals to achieve.

The ideal candidate will have led in the development of a JavaScript application at scale. You'll mastered JavaScript long ago, knowing the pitfalls of asynchronous javascript, and know how to leverage modern standards to avoid them. You'll evangelize importance of encapsulation, separation of concerns and other best practices that lead to building…

Amplitude Analytics | San Francisco, CA (SOMA) | https://amplitude.com | ONSITE

We help companies build better products by providing analytics for understanding user behavior. We believe that the future of product development is in smart, easy-to-use analytics that helps you make good decisions and invest in the right areas. We're a 300-person company (40 engineers), and we raised our Series D in 2018. We've gotten incredible traction helping customers like Square, Atlassian, Dropbox, Twitter, Twitch, and Capital One change the way they build products. We were recognized in Wealthfront's Career-Launching Companies (https://blog.wealthfront.com/career-launching-companies-list/) and Forbes' Cloud 100 (https://www.forbes.com/cloud100/list/).

We have many open positions that can be found here (we're growing fast!): https://boards.greenhouse.io/amplitude. In particular, we're looking to expand the engineering team with the following positions:

* Engineer Manager, Product Engineering

* Senior/Staff Product Engineer (React)

* Staff DevSecOps Engineer

* Senior Data Scientist - Causal Inference

* Senior/Staff Software Engineer, Infrastructure

Our tech stack consists of Java, Python, Redis, Kafka, PostgreSQL, Elasticsearch, Docker, SaltStack, Terraform, Kubernetes on the backend and JavaScript, React, Redux, Flow, Highcharts, d3 on the frontend. We've got a number of challenging technical problems to solve thanks to being in the analytics space, and we're looking for people…

> Background: this is my first job out of college, and I joined the startup ~9 months ago, right when they launched (I'm engineer #2, before me, the founders outsourced the prototype to an offshore team).

Generally, but never as a rule, purely non-technical founders and an outsourcing is a red flag. But again, that is never a rule, and there are plenty of good companies started by non-technical founders that later matured. Still, that does leave you with the question, of how they chose the CTO?

> Right now, we have ~1200 registered user, with about 100 active users, and we gained about ~100 users/month.

This is not a useful metric. How does this translate into revenue: for some kind of business software (e.g., optimization/recommendations for retailers provided as a service and based on subscription fees) this is great, for a destination site that is poor. Is this rate increasing or increasing?

Now to the meat of your argument: "waterfall" -- why do you call it water fall? 1 hour standups _are_ a problem, but I could imagine a scenario where this might occur for a few days in a row (although never beyond that). "Deployment update every 4-5 weeks" -- depends on what goes into the update, although it's hard to imagine this being a normal stable-state rate for an early stage (or any Internet/SaaS) company; yet for a company providing something like a database a service, it could be fine (provided you're able to push quick fixes and UI updates faster). "I tried to write…

I'm seeing a surprising number of comments describing catastrophic tax outcomes due to exercising options with a large spread and holding the stock long enough for it to tank before selling, while still being stuck with a massive tax bill.

This situation is easily avoided by filing your 83b and early exercising your options immediately, or at least before a subsequent funding round/term sheet valuation cycle.

None of the comments describing those outcomes mention this. For those reading and new to the startup game, read up on the 83b. When you're an early employee at a startup, the cost of early-exercising even a substantial number of shares is often not cost-prohibitive. And should you leave the company before it all vests, you get a check for the unvested remains. It's a NO-BRAINER when the exercise cost is small.

https://blog.wealthfront.com/always-file-your-83b/

There have been a lot of rules of thumb over the years. 50/50 and 60/40 used to be common advice, no matter the age of the investor. When modern portfolio theory became influential, the "age in bonds" rule of thumb became common. Now some people, e.g. Burton Malkiel and others who are involved with the robo-investing companies, say that young people don't need bonds at all, and that high-dividend blue chip stocks can be a good substitute: https://blog.wealthfront.com/investor-bond-market/

There's no simple answer. There might be a right answer, but so far no consensus view has lasted for long. Most of the arguments I've seen have been heavily dependent on bond yields at the time the arguments were made, and are therefore not universal advice. For example, 50/50 made a lot more sense when treasury bonds were paying more than 7% per year.

As stated before, it doesn't work that way. Google the horror stories on those who have excercised options (and held the stock) on a liquidity event who had to pay taxes on gains that existed at the time of the transaction, but later dropped in value. Even though they never saw a gain other than on paper, they get hit with a tax bill they can no longer afford. And the stock is unhelpful because it's current market value is no longer reflective of what it was at the time the IRS recognizes the gain. In your scenario, she could only cover her tax bill with the stock if it were at a equal or higher value as when she excercized them via the loan: https://blog.wealthfront.com/exercise-stock-options-taxes/