About us

Ratio is a technology consulting company that specializes in helping government agencies and healthcare organizations solve messy data integration challenges. In partnership with our clients, we:

• Guide product and technology strategy
• Design and build resilient software applications
• Run and support business critical systems in production
• Develop modern product & technology capabilities within clients’ organizations

Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, we’ve worked in partnership with leading NGOs and public health agencies to build and manage open-source software. Our work has improved the efficiency of public health interventions like contact tracing and case investigation for state and local health departments.

Our typical work schedule is 4-day, 32-hour weeks. While we occasionally stretch outside of that schedule to respond to production incidents or prepare for a product launch, it’s important to us to build a resilient organization that works at a sustainable pace (and we encourage you to ask our team about their experience with this in your interview).

We work with organizations ranging from seed-stage startups through state Departments of Health. We continue to pursue opportunities to help government and healthcare organizations fulfill their important, service-oriented missions, and we’re looking for new folks to join us!

My name: Jesse Cooke
My position: CTO
Company name: Ratio PBC, Inc.
Company website: https://ratiopbc.com
Company headquarters (country): USA (Portland Oregon or Remote)

About the job

Job title: Mid/Senior/Staff Software Engineer

As a software engineer at Ratio, you’ll design, develop, and operate resilient software applications for our clients: public and private health and human services organizations. We enjoy using both modern (e.g. Elixir, Pulumi, Tailscale) and finely aged (e.g. PostgreSQL, FreeBSD) developer-friendly technologies via agile processes (TDD, CI/CD, Kanban, etc) while working on projects that have a positive impact on our public health and healthcare systems.

In this role, you’ll:

• Demonstrate and foster empathy for the humans impacted by the system (we’ve built for members of the public, patients, clinicians, researchers, epidemiologists, etc.)
• Collaborate with professionalism and respect with other developers, designers, product managers
• Work with Product and Clients to determine requirements ranging from design to infrastructure
• Discover technical product requirements by investigating data sources (reviewing technical documentation, looking at source data, etc.)
• Design sequence diagrams, user/system flows, low-fidelity wire frames, etc. to communicate system behavior visually, and write publishable documentation to communicate system behavior verbally
• Contribute to effective Client meetings and working sessions
• Ship high quality, secure products that you will operate/support in production
• Evaluate existing software systems, and advise on “build vs. buy” decisions for various components
• Support internal organizational development efforts, such as hiring/interviewing candidates

We’re looking for an experienced software engineer (we’re open to hiring the right candidate at varying levels of experience. As part of the interview process, we’ll assess your skills and experience against our expectations for mid, senior, or staff level) with demonstrated ability to design, deliver and operate high quality software in complex and tightly integrated environments. We’re looking for someone who brings excellent communication and collaboration skills alongside their technical skills and experience.

The ideal candidate has:

• Extended experience as a software engineer in an agile product organization
• Experience developing and operating software written in the Elixir programming language (or demonstrated ability to learn new programming languages quickly)
• Experience developing technical or data products, such as integrations, APIs, data pipelines, etc.
• Experience working with healthcare data systems
• Experience working closely with clients
• Due to our clients’ security policies, we are restricted to hiring employees based in the United States. You will be required to be located in the United States to perform core functions of this job (i.e., accessing production data).
• Due to some of our clients being government agencies, we require a background check and may require a drug screening.

A note on experience expectations: Research shows that quantifying experience expectations can discourage great candidates of diverse communities from applying, so we didn’t pick an arbitrary # of years of experience. If you think you have the right skills and experience, and this sounds like a role you’d excel in, we’d love to hear from you!* We care less about the criteria listed above than your background & how you think. If this role sounds interesting, we encourage you to apply!

Salary range dependent on the level:

• Mid: $120,000/year
• Senior: $140,000/year
• Staff: $160,000/year

We are internally transparent about the finances of the business. As an employee, you’ll receive a monthly update that includes our core financial statements. This transparency holds us accountable to being fair in how we compensate our employees.

Position on remote work: We are a remote-first company with a nexus in Portland, OR. You are welcome to work from anywhere in the continental US.

Compensation and Benefits

We are internally transparent about the finances of the business. As an employee, you’ll receive a monthly update that includes our core financial statements. This transparency holds us accountable to being fair in how we compensate our employees.

We offer a flexible vacation policy of 4 weeks paid leave. This means there is no maximum or minimum amount of time that employees may take each year, but four weeks is a good starting point.

We offer 9 days of paid sick leave per year.

We take 10 paid company holidays per year:

• New Years Day
• Martin Luther King Day
• Presidents’ Day
• Memorial Day
• Juneteenth National Independence Day
• Independence Day
• Labor Day
• Indigenous Peoples’ Day
• Thanksgiving Day
• Christmas Day

Equity Expectations

This position will come with a grant of 0.5% - 0.75% options in Ratio PBC on a standard 4 year vesting schedule with a 1 year cliff.

We’re a profitable professional services company, not a venture-backed startup, so expectations of equity payout and risk are quite different from the more traditional model. That said, it’s important to us that every employee has the opportunity to be an owner, which is why we invested in an employee stock option program.

Family + Health Benefits

• We offer 12 weeks of paid parental leave.
• We offer several options for health, dental and vision benefit plans and cover 60% of premium cost for employees, spouses / domestic partners, and dependents.

About the interview process

We will start off by reviewing your resume and cover letter and then schedule a call if we think you may be a good fit. Since we’re small, you’ll have conversations with the whole team (all staff level developers and PMs) and then go through a background check (see note below). We’ll be in close contact as the process unfolds.

Further info

To apply, email recruiting@ratiopbc.com with

Subject Line: [JOB] Software Engineer

Body:

• Resume / CV
  • Note: Expand on the why and the value, not the what or the how.
• GitHub (if available)
• LinkedIn (if available)
• Why you are interested in the role (1 paragraph)
• How your experience makes you a good fit for this role (1 paragraph)
• How you could add to Ratio’s culture (1 paragraph)
• Include anything else you think would help you stand out!