Why you, a software engineer, should sell pet drugs on the internet with me
18 months ago, I left my job as an engineering manager at Amazon Pharmacy (née PillPack). I had a superb manager, good pay, great health insurance, and was on track for a promotion. I left because I had an opportunity to be the first full-time engineer at Koala Health — a pet pharmacy startup. An opportunity to build a company from the ground up with people I trust.
From opening the pharmacy to shipping our first customers to making our first hire, it’s been a year and a half since then. I’m confident I made the right decision.
What We Do at Koala
We fill prescriptions for cats and dogs. Sorry, we don’t yet serve axolotls, ponies, or lizard-people.
We work with your vet to get your meds right. Our prices are no higher than you’d pay with your vet and shipping is always free. When you’re nearly out of refills, we communicate with your vet to make sure you get meds on time.
So far, so boring.
What we do differently — for folks who want it — is package all your pet’s meds in pre-sorted, tear-off pouches. We write the administration date and time written right on the pouch. You never have to worry if your partner gave Daisy her meds. If they did, the pouch wouldn’t still be there.
Multiple drugs? They’re all already in the pouch together.
Multiple pets? Easy, every pet gets their own dispenser box.
If you read this and you want us to be your pet’s pharmacy, that’s great! Feel free to use code MEDIUM30 at checkout to get $30 off your first order. No, I don’t get a commission: I’ll just be happy. For now, call in if you’d like pouch packaging.
We’ve shipped meds to thousands of happy pets and their owners and now we’re looking for software engineers to join us. The main reason you should join us is:
Our Culture
We care about the product more than the tech
We care about what problem our code solves and always ask “why?”. It may seem silly but the ensuing discussion often leads to a better solution. And when we build internal tools for the pharmacy, we ask the experts: our pharmacists and techs.
We take pride in our craftsmanship, but we don’t use new tech for its own sake. We use a Rails monolith to get our ideas into reality quickly and legibly. We use a React storefront to provide the interactivity our customers expect from us.
We do less
We admire extraordinary decision-making, not extra effort. We focus on the business objective and discuss all our options to reach it together as a team. Our options include non-engineering work and also doing nothing. To pick, we try to support our long-term engineering goals and then aim for 80% of the value with 20% of the perfect solution’s effort.
However, success isn’t at the end of a Gantt chart and building to spec doesn’t equate to success. As we build, we learn. Our approach may no longer be the best way to achieve our objectives. We adapt accordingly and adjust the project’s timeline as we need.
We’ve seen this co-operative, adaptable planning pay off. In the last year, we’ve built systems equivalent to those I saw built at a previous startup in three.
This planning doesn’t take long. I sit in 2.5 hours of meetings per week, including an hour long 1:1 with my manager — a co-founder — in which I take pleasant walks along the Boston shore. Despite being proud of my work, I rarely work extra hours. I’m proud of that too. Even the founders take regular and substantial vacations.
We maximize leverage
To make the most of a small team with an anti-workaholic culture, we need to make our effort count. We work so that the team gets more done, not just today but tomorrow. We place the highest value on activities like interviewing, reviewing PRs, and learning your damn key-bindings.
We’re (very) human
I asked the folks in the pharmacy how they would describe our culture. The common theme: Koala is refreshingly human. We have fun together. We have more than 50 pounds of skittles on-hand and my life-partner’s childhood drawing of a Koala hanging on our wall. Outside of work, I play video games together on a team with both the head of pharmacy ops and our newest pharmacy tech.
And we care. We care about each other, our customers, and their pets. And — while I admit that every company says this — we really do care about nurturing a diverse team and making everyone feel welcome.
Oh, and we sell drugs to cute pets
Like this special dog.
If you’re still here, hopefully you’re at least a little bit sold on Koala. So let’s talk about…
You
You write well in a high-level programming language
You’re reliable and you’ve done this kind of work before. You’ve had at least a couple years of professional-level experience. You’re used to working with a team on a long-lived, production web-application. You write code that’s easy for other people to read and modify.
If you’re not sure if you fit these criteria, we encourage you to err on the side of applying.
For our back-end we work mainly in Ruby (on Rails) but we’re happy for you to learn it on -the-job. However, we expect you’ve written in a reasonably high-level imperative language before like Python or Perl or, yes, readable Java. I learned Ruby on-the-job coming from a (mainly) Python background and it quickly became my favorite language. If you program in LISP or C or COBOL, you get bonus points, but only in my heart.
If you’re looking to work on our front-end, we’re stricter. We expect you’ve worked with JavaScript before since it’s a unique language running in a unique context (the browser). You should also be experienced working with React or a similar framework.
You may not be the stereotype of an engineer
In previous jobs we’ve worked before with many superb engineers who’ve been from unusual backgrounds: an ex-philosophy professor, a former kayak-builder, an escape-room-designer-coding-bootcamp-grad, a mix of physicists, biologists, and chemists. And, lest it need to be said, many of the best engineers I’ve worked with are women, trans-gendered, people of color, over 50, or parents. If you’re a member of an under-represented group in tech or if you have a non-traditional engineering background, we encourage you to apply.
You live and work in the US
We deal in the regulated US healthcare industry so hiring outside the country is a hurdle we’d prefer to avoid for now. Additionally, we’re not yet mature enough to be a good H-1B sponsor but — if this affects you — we’d love to talk to you once we are. Sorry, that includes you, Canadians.
Other than those limitations, our engineers work remote unless they’re local and want to stop into the pharmacy. While we’d enjoy seeing each other once in a while, it’s not a requirement. If you do come to visit, our pharmacy is in Boston right next to South Station.
So how do I apply?
Easy. All our jobs are posted here with convenient links to apply. You’ll just need to provide a resume and a few details. Optionally, there’s an additional info section where you can write about how you started a home business selling booties to Iguanas on Etsy.
We look forward to hearing from you.
