Trade is hiring engineers excited about logistics, marketplaces, and agriculture

Contact: wilson [at] tradeghana.co

What is Trade?

Trade is a for-profit company funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Y Combinator, and Sam Altman (and others!). We are building a mobile-based commodity exchange for use across frontier markets and have started with trading maize in northern Ghana. Since launching in October 2016, we have traded over 3,000 tonnes (more than $770,000 worth) of corn and have averaged over 90% monthly growth in revenue and volume traded. We are actively working with over 600 sellers across more than 170 villages. We started this company motivated by the market challenges facing agricultural systems around the world. Our business goal is to become the go-to means of trading anything over distance in Africa, and our systems goal is to trade the highest volume of goods in the fairest way possible.

About us

We’re a multinational (Ghanaian + American, at the moment) team entirely based in Ghana. We have experience with some of the leading agriculture, technology, and development organizations in the world. And we’re serious about our work: we actually think we can do this and are working very hard to make it happen. We’re grateful to be able to work in close proximity to our users and to be able to see everyday how our product is adding value to their lives.

Our Software Products

Our internal-facing sales/logistics operations app and our consumer-facing app are both written in React Native, and our Clojure + Python backend runs on Heroku. We also run an automated voice platform built for our users who don’t have smartphones, which is built with Twilio + Clojure + Heroku. All of our products are continuously delivered via GitHub + CircleCI, with automated Heroku deploys and DB migrations for the backend and CodePush for mobile.

Roles

Though our team is fairly large (25 people), most of those people work in operations (majority at our warehouses). We currently only have one full-time engineer, and the people we are hiring now will form the core that will lead and build our engineering team and culture in the years to come.

Product Engineer You will lead the development of one of our user-facing products. You will execute on product vision. You will work closely with our operations team to discover gaps and define opportunities for our products and work to respond. It’s important to you that what you build is directly used by users. App architecture, extensibility, and maintainability are also important to you. You get equal satisfaction in having both what is seen by the user and what is not be beautifully built.

Backend Engineer You will lead the architecture and implementation of the backend work supporting our client products. You have a strong sense of system design and tradeoffs. You get excited about beautiful API design and good documentation and process. You are eager to join a team with a nascent codebase that will grow to take on challenges in a variety of rich problem domains. Ideally you have several years of industry experience.

In both roles we are looking for people who can make good decisions with limited information. Who think carefully about the fine balance between the necessity to ship product and the necessity to write maintainable, bug-free code. Who define process where there is none, rather than getting lost without explicit direction.

Compensation

Salary: $30,000

Equity: 0.5 - 2% (depending on experience)