Hiring Samaritan’s Android Engineer

Jonathan Kumar
Samaritan Journal
Published in
3 min readMar 23, 2020

| about |

Samaritan seeks a team member to join us in helping people on the street access the resources needed to find a home. If that sounds like you, and you’ve got a gift for Android development, we’d love for you to consider sharing your gifts with the people we serve.

Outreach teams and case managers use our smart wallets — called beacons — as a resource for people experiencing homelessness. Individuals set their own housing and health goals and then can access the financial and social capital needed to meet those goals.

Samaritan enables providers to issue beacons, update goals and needs, and help beacon holders spend money. It also enables everyday individuals and organizations learn the stories of individuals and join their team of supporters to help them meet set goals. Over 10,000 “samaritans” invested more than $100K and 1,000 letters of encouragement into a pilot cohort of 500 beacon holders, enabling dozens to reach life-changing outcomes. This is just the start, with additional pilots in LA, OKC, and NYC coming online soon.

You’ll be joining an incredible task-force of 6 (one backend, one backend/Android, one iOS, and three non-technical). You’ll collaborate to ship user-requested features and upgrades that grow the amount of financial & social capital that is put into the hands of people in need.

| skills required |
- Native Android Java
- Frontend Implementation & Animations
- Git
- Kotlin
- Activities
- Fragments
- Services
- Broadcast Receivers
- REST API Integrations with Retrofit 2

| plus |
- RxJava and RxAndroid
- Unit Testing with JUnit
- UI Testing with Espresso Framework
- CI

| soft skills |
* Ability to balance engineering excellence with velocity. We need someone to implement features fast, and implement them well

* Ability to communicate effectively with teammates, onsite and remote. Since our engineering team is distributed, it’s very important that everyone is on the same page.

* Ability to translate information between technical and non-technical team members.

* Eagerness to take ownership of features from conception to deployment. It’s not uncommon for a developer at Samaritan to take an idea for a feature, and own the development of that idea all the way to production.

* Willingness to wear many hats. You’ll be responsible for maintaining infrastructure, writing code, and designing implementations for features that span multiple codebases and platforms. You’re responsible for doing whatever needs to be done to get features to users.

* Ability to quickly adapt and reprioritize to the needs of the team. No two days are the same. We need the kind of person who can hear a pitch for a feature on Monday and put that feature into production on Friday.

  • Ability to lead & learn independently

| compensation & hiring |

Samaritan hackers are compensated on a bounty system: every feature or upgrade has a bounty on it, which goes to you when you ship it. So the higher the impact you have for our users, the higher your compensation.

Strong preference given to candidates who can be onsite with us in Seattle (once this virus blows over). Will also consider a FT remote candidate in the right circumstances.

Send us a note with a few project links and we’ll get started.

Chris Sun, Product Owner & Beacon Storyteller

220 2nd Ave S., Impact Hall Seattle

chris@samaritan.city

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Jonathan Kumar
Jonathan Kumar

Written by Jonathan Kumar

Working on @youaresamaritan to help people help others.

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