Location: New York

Compensation range: $120-150k, 0.5-3% equity

Everybody should be able to code. We dream of end-user programming by way of end-programmer programming.

Val Town is a website to write and deploy code. We’re building a social hub where people can write code with zero friction or setup: just open a tab, write some TypeScript, and click run. We think of a “val” as a new web primitive, like a Tweet or Github Repo, that can be forked, liked, shared, commented on, and run. We’re building an editing environment, a sandboxed runtime, logging & observability for user code, and social tools like leaderboards, comments, likes, and sharing.

We’re a small team that ships. We take pride in crafting a simple, powerful product that programmers love. We iterate quickly, but think deeply about elegant abstractions and stable systems. We enjoy shipping features and fixes within hours, or even minutes, of them being requested.

We’re hiring a founding engineer to join us in Brooklyn. Maybe it’s you!

On an average day, we’re designing new APIs, tuning our CodeMirror configuration, debugging our custom code analysis system, updating our Deno-based evaluation server. But we also spend a lot of time designing and redesigning UIs to balance simplicity and power, and doing a lot of writing and communication. We are pre-seed startup with big ambitions, so we think a lot about growth and scalability.

You’re a programmer to your core, but love talking to users.

You write maintainable code, but know when to ship a quick prototype and when to carefully design a feature.

You are self-directed, take ownership, and are up for whatever’s needed on a particular day.

You have good product sense, care deeply about making customers happy, and have had some sort of success shipping something on your own — a blog, open source project, etc.

You value kindness and integrity.

Your skills and experiences:

Not for this role. We believe working in person sparks magic. Especially in the earliest days of our company, we are trying to foster a vibrant New York office culture.

Every member on our team gets medical, dental, vision, and a 401k. This founding position includes a very meaningful amount of equity. Our sunny office also has a nice gym.

Email steve@val.town. We’re excited to hear from you!