We're hiring someone to lead our backend engineering. The purpose of this letter is to help you decide if this role is right for you. And if it turns out this is a fit, my claim is that you will be hard-pressed to find something more meaningful and impactful for your life and career.
It will take you some time to read through, but if you do, you should learn something new, have a clear sense of what we're working on, and know if you'll thrive in our current environment. You won't find traditional requirements. Mostly because this isn't a traditional role. For the right person, this could be a once-in-lifetime chance to do something that matters and propel your personal growth.
Thanks in advance for reading and sleep well,
Leon
Co-founder, CTO @ Rise Science
The short answer: we're building a sleep app for everyday people that helps you be less tired and get more out of your day. Sleep is the most potent performance enhancing drug there is. It's the foundation of literally everything we can measure about you. And it's your nights that dictate your days.
Read about how we got started: Our founders' journey to sleep and its importance.
You might ask “Does the world need another sleep app?” The answer is, no, it doesn’t. At least not a traditional one...
Through years of user research and product development, we learned that people don’t want to spend more time sleeping.
What people really want is to have more energy.
It turns out that the biggest determinant of your energy levels is your sleep. However, the tools available today only address part of the problem. Some are trying to help you fall asleep (like Calm) and others aim to measure your sleep (like Fitbit, WHOOP, and Oura). None of these services are designed to help you feel better and have more energy. In fact, WHOOP’s recent peer-reviewed paper shows that while their tracker is accurate for measuring sleep it does not effectively improve sleep behavior. For people to feel better sleep tracking is necessary but not sufficient.
RISE is not a sleep tracker. Our mission is to affect long-term behavior change to help people feel better and have more energy. After all, that is what people want. And to do that, you need to make the feedback loop between your sleep and your daily energy instant. We are not alone, the academic literature backs this up: BJ Fogg says that “it’s emotion that creates behavior, not repetition.” And this is why our company is called Rise Science. We couple peer-reviewed science with constant user feedback to guide our product development.
It’s taken a decade of rigorous work and research to get here. We’ve invested millions of dollars (from the investors behind Peloton, Fitbit, Spotify, Facebook, and Twitter). We’ve studied tens of thousands of users – high schoolers to pro athletes, working parents to retirees - to design and build scientifically robust algorithms to help people live their best lives possible.