Willful

Hi! I’m Matt McFadyen, CTO at Willful. As the first hire at Willful, I lead the Delivery & Product teams and have helped the company grow to 15 people over the last couple of years. At Willful we’re known for bringing the crucial but overlooked task of estate planning out of the shadows and into the same conversation as insurance, financial planning, and filing your taxes. While end-of-life planning is a very sensitive subject, our mission at Willful is to use technology and empathy to make the process as simple and painless as possible. It’s a great day at Willful when a customer finishes their will and writes to tell us “Hey, that was kind of fun!”

Our user-friendly design has caught the attention of major publications such as The Globe and Mail, The Toronto Star, Global News, Betakit, and more. Willful has been approached for partnerships from industry leaders in banking, insurance, and employee benefits, and we have active partnerships with Wealthsimple, Koho, Mercer, and other brands.

Every adult needs a will and should have an emergency plan in place for their own peace of mind and to help guide their loved ones. Giving people an accessible, dependable and affordable option is the fuel that drives us every day. We’ve helped thousands of customers create their wills and Power of Attorney documents since launching in 2017, and now we’re looking to hire a collaborative full-time software developer to help us continue on our mission.

As a senior full-stack Software Developer in our small and collaborative Engineering team, you’ll report directly to myself, and work broadly within our larger Delivery team. Our team’s mission is to turn business goals and requirements into new revenue-generating features and products. You will have a big impact on the success of our product, including the opportunity to take ownership of our codebase, establish design patterns, guide our back-end architecture decisions, and help shape the culture of our Engineering team. 

This is an exciting opportunity to be one of the first few engineering hires at a company that’s solving challenging problems in an interesting domain that is ripe for disruption. This isn’t just a heads-down coding role, you will have opportunities to grow your skillset, and own and guide entire implementations. We commit to providing you with the full support of the team you’ll need to be successful, including coaching, access to tools and software, and education opportunities. 

THE OPPORTUNITY

• Working with Matt, CTO to architect technical solutions that align with the business needs.
• Building new features and squashing bugs on our web app built with a Ruby on Rails REST API powering a React/Redux SPA.
• Developing, testing, deploying, and monitoring your code through all stages of the software development lifecycle.
• Following our internal Scrum process, including sprint planning, technical solutioning, retrospectives, and demos for the leadership team.

WHAT YOU’LL BRING TO THE TABLE

• Experience: You’re an experienced software developer.
• Enthusiastic: You are already successful as an individual contributor, but are eager to grow and evolve your career. You’ve mentored team members before and have aspirations of becoming a team lead in the future.
• Back-End Expertise: You’re an expert in Ruby, and have significant Rails or equivalent-framework experience. You have experience designing, coding, and documenting REST APIs. You’ve integrated with external services, and are comfortable mapping objects and associations between Ruby and a relational database.
• Dev-Ops Experience: You have experience and a passion for growing and maintaining our CI/CD and infrastructure as we scale. Bonus points for Cloud platform expertise.
• Front-End familiarity: Ideally, you also have front-end skills and have familiarity working with React or modern front-end frameworks.
• Detail Oriented: You understand and appreciate the importance of clean, readable, extensible code. Your discipline and attention to detail make you carefully consider each line you write, and it really ‘bugs’ you if something goes wrong in production.
• Responsive communicator: You’re comfortable working in a cross-functional Scrum team, collaborating with engineering, product and design, and demonstrating your work to stakeholders across the business. You welcome differing perspectives.
• Resourceful: You can find the answer to any question. You’ll learn anything you need to to get your job done.
• Cooperative team player: You can jump in and help with product development, QA, or other areas. You are willing to pitch in to achieve our team’s mission.
• Entrepreneurial: You take an owner’s approach to growth; you are committed to your work at Willful and want to share in the company’s success.

We don’t care where you went to school - or if you went to school - as long as you have a proven track record of success building software. If you don’t check every box, but you can show us a product you’ve successfully built in the past— we encourage you to apply.

Work where you want to

We’re looking for the right developer to join our team, so this role isn’t limited by geography and can be 100% remote. The only requirement is that you must be legally able to work in Canada. Willful offers flexible work-from-home options. If you are based in Toronto, you’ll be working 100% remotely until COVID-19 restrictions lift. Eventually, we will be implementing a flexible WFH/ WFO schedule, the Willful HQ is located at Wellington & Portland. 

When

May 2021 (flexible start date)

 Perks

- Competitive salary and participation in employee stock option plan;

- Sun Life benefits plan including health, dental, and vision;

- Choice of $500 perk: a health spending account (HSA) OR as RRSP matching through Wealthsimple for Employees;

- An annual education budget to develop your existing skills or learn a new skill set;

- Shortened summer hours, and company-wide “recharge” days off in December in addition to your vacation time; 

- Competitive parental leave policy;

- Flexible work hours to accommodate both work and home life;

- Opportunities for coaching and mentorship in engineering and product;

- Work in a maintained and modern codebase - we value tests, refactoring, and quality;

- Fun, inclusive quarterly team events and regular team lunches (currently virtual).

Post COVID-19 considerations...

- Fully stocked kitchen with healthy snacks

- Accommodating work from home schedule

- Casual dress code in a creative office environment

- Annual team retreat

Interviewing at Willful:

1. Phone screen with Jade Hugh, Sr. Talent Advisor from Bloom

2. Virtual 90-min. Technical Interview with Matt McFadyen (CTO) and Matt Holtom (Software Consultant) 

3. Virtual Interview with Erin Bury (Co-Founder & CEO) or Julia Staffen (COO)

4. Reference Check

5. Offer

*Following the advice of Canadian health authorities, to mitigate the risk of potential spread of COVID-19 and support social distancing, all recruiting activities including interviews and new hire onboarding will be conducted virtually.

Like Bloom, Willful is committed to a fair and equitable hiring process for all candidates. To ensure that each candidate’s journey is consistent and the selection process is unbiased, the hiring manager will not be responding to any personal messages regarding this role or other opportunities. 

Deadline to apply:  Friday, May 14, 2021 by 5 PM (EST), please submit your application through Bloom.

Willful is an equal opportunity employer. We celebrate our inclusive work environment and welcome members of all backgrounds and perspectives to apply. We are committed to providing reasonable accommodations and will work with you to meet your needs. We have a commitment to diverse hiring, and are proud to say that 50% of our team, and 50% of our C-level executives, are women.

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At Bloom we do not use fancy tech to search through resumes. Every resume is reviewed by a human and that process takes time. To ensure that we attain a consistent and equitable interview process we take a high level of care with every application. Our process may be a bit longer than others because we take an inclusive and intentional approach to reviewing every application we receive.

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