Software Developer

Living Spec is an early stage startup striving to solve the classic problem of "what are we building and why".

Too often we lack the details necessary to build features, we rely on our of date specs (dead on arrival vs. living) or we have systems and processes in place that are tedious and inefficient.

On the surface Living Spec looks similar to Google Docs or Notion (intentionally familiar), but it provides a highly streamlined approach to collaborating on product details and specs that the Living Spec team works to improve every day.

The founding team is based in Belgrade and the US. Both co-founders are engineers and actively work on product development and all the other things startups need to do. The Living Spec team contributes regular fixes and features to the open source projects we leverage (Slate, Plate, Yjs, etc.).

Living Spec has completed angel and pre-seed levels of funding. We need your help to build a product that people love.

Our tech stack

• FullStack TypeScript
• React, Nextjs and friends
• Visx, Visjs, Font Awesome, and various CSS libraries
• Slate, Plate, Yjs, SocketIO, and friends
• Mammoth, Unified, remark, and a variety of tools to convert content between formats
• Node.js, Express
• RavenDB
• Mocha, Sinon, Chai, Cucumber

We do our best to leverage useful things in the ecosystem without becoming npm install *. ?

Architecture & Design

• Monorepo
• Hexagonal Architecture
• Domain Driven Design
• CQRS & Event Sourcing
• Component/Integration/Unit testing strategy
• Core Product extensible with integrations

Things we need help with

• Monorepo build streamlining
• Application scalability
• UI/UX
  • We are obsessed with efficiency and approachable UIs. Some parts of our product are excellent, while others were rolled out very quickly and need love
• Rich text editor maintenance and performance
  • We leverage Slate, Plate, and several other packages.
  • Our co-founder is a maintainer of both Plate and Slate, and we actively contribute foundational improvements to each.
• Even then, we still have much to learn about making a perfect editor and have many areas where we could improve
• Integration framework and third-party API design
• e2e testing and general test coverage improvements

Other requirements

• Written and verbal English communication skills
• Comfort and tolerance working within an imperfect codebase, making pragmatic, incremental improvements instead of feeling the need to burn things down and reinvent the wheel

What we offer

The opportunity to work on a product that should make every software developer's life better.

Competitive compensation, flexible work conditions (mostly work from home, occasionally meetup in real life... we sometimes work at Impact Hub Belgrade), challenging TypeScript and web engineering problems to solve, and more depending on the role. We care more about getting the help we need than having a specific pre-determined job role in mind.