👋 What is Channel and what do we do?

Channel: Ask a data question, get an answer.

At Channel, we use cutting-edge AI to answer your data questions. We help our customers answer questions like: “which artists achieved more than 100 million streams over the last year?”, “How many donations did our charity receive last month?” and “Which of our customers are about to churn?” without needing to rely on a data analyst to answer those questions. With Channel, you simply ask a question in plain English and Channel serves you the answer.

In only one month since opening our beta, we have already filled the first 100 spots of our beta program, with a further 6,500 businesses on the Channel waiting list.

At Channel, we believe that a small team of amazing people can outperform the average team of 100 people and have focused on the best and brightest in our team of 5. We are now looking for an exceptional full-stack hacker who’s excited to build magical new interactions and demystify data for everyone. Our product is very complicated and technical, and the key challenge is taking this complexity and turning it into magical experiences for our users who don’t want to have to worry about SQL, or databases, or anything except getting the data they need,

🎯 What will you be working on?

• At the moment, we’re focused on implementing the feedback we’ve got from our existing users, and cracking through more of our product roadmap.
  
  
• You’ll work closely with Gökçen, our designer.
  
  
• The goal for us is for our product to feel magic, intuitive, and powerful to non-technical users. What this means is that any of our users should come to Channel and know we’re going to give them the answers and the insight they need without needing a data analyst involved. More concretely, over the next six months our key goals are:
  • Understand our customers more.
  • Implement “slice-and-dice” functionality which lets non-technical users drill down into a dataset easily and intuitively.
  • Build out better multidimensional visualisations.
  • Build out “follow up” question functionality.
  • Let users do hypothesis testing without having to understand the maths behind it (e.g. ask Channel “is this statistically significant” and for us to run the right test and display the results in an easy-to-understand way.)
  • Improve the quality of our SQL generation. This is very hard to benchmark!
  • Build out our query explanation technology.
  • Build out self-service onboarding (at the moment we do this manually which is extremely time-consuming!)
  • Integrate with more data sources.
  • Loads more.
    
    
• We also have loads of less obviously interesting SaaS work to do - we can’t even take payment at the moment, or give a customer a way to manage users. It really is early days at Channel and we’re trying to go as fast as possible.

🧐 Who are we looking for?

We’re looking for an amazing full-stack hacker to help us build and scale our features to meet demand! The ideal candidate probably leans more towards frontend than backend, but is happy to have a go at anything. We’re a super small team so you need to be able to get shipping pretty fast, and be happy working under a reasonable amount of ambiguity (we are a pre-product-market fit startup).

🤟🏼 You'd be a great fit if you're:

• Have experience with any full-stack MVC framework i.e. Django, Rails, Phoenix, Laravel. This isn’t a requirement, but experience with any of these will let you get going with our backend faster.
  
  
• Experience with any React framework, ideally Next.js. Again, if you don’t have this they any similar experience would be great.
  
  
• Great problem solving and system design skills. The most important thing for us at the moment is going fast, so a bias towards under-testing and over-hacking is what we’re going for at the moment. It’s fine if stuff breaks, as long as we fix it.
  
  
• Years of experience isn’t necessarily a good metric, but you should be confident calling yourself a senior engineer. We’re looking for someone who can pick up a problem and solve it.

💻 Our Current Stack:

We’ve tried to keep the stack as simple as possible, and the current non-exhaustive stack is:

• Python + Django + PostgreSQL + AWS
  
  
• Typescript + Next.js + Tailwind + Vercel

👊 What we’re offering

This list is not exhaustive but at least:

• Salary: £80,000.
  
  
• Equity (Options): 1.0%.
  
  
• Holiday: 25 days holiday as minimum (you can take more).
  
  
• Flexible working: we measure output, not input.
  
  
• Technology: a new laptop (probably a M2 Macbook Air, but you can choose).
  
  
• Professional Development: £1k a year to spend on professional development (loosely defined i.e. can be conferences, books, courses, etc).
  
  
• Office: we have an office in London (The Strand) and are pro in-person but open to remote roles. 

⚙️ Interview Process

The interview process will be:

• You send over a CV to us.
  
  
• We get back to you and set up a 30 min interview with the cofounders on Zoom/Google Meet/etc. to talk about your experience, the company, and do culture fit stuff.
  
  
• If that goes well, we’ll either do a ~1hr technical assessment in person/over Zoom which will be about a real-world problem related to Channel, or if you prefer we can do a longer take-home assessment which we can discuss in person/over Zoom afterwards.
  
  
• And if that goes well, we’ll have 30 more mins with the cofounders to talk again about culture, the roadmap, and for you to ask any more questions you have for us.

✍🏼 Get in touch if you’re interested in learning more