About Ekho

Who

Ekho (www.ekhodealer.com) is transforming the way vehicles are bought and sold. As the ‘Stripe Checkout’ for new vehicle sales, our licensed e-commerce platform enables manufacturers (of cars, motorcycles, RVs, golf carts, you name it) to sell vehicles compliantly from their own websites. Through our white-label online sales channel, buyers are able to complete a full vehicle purchase entirely online in minutes.

Why

If you tried to purchase a new vehicle online from almost any manufacturer’s site right now, odds are that the closest you’ll get is locating your nearest dealer… It’s 2024 and almost all vehicle manufacturers don’t have an online sales channel where online buyers can convert.

Selling vehicles in the U.S comes with lots of baggage. Selling through traditional channels - brick and mortar dealerships - is costly to build out (takes years to get full coverage, costs millions) and comes with significant downsides (no online sales, significant margin costs, lost control over the CX). The alternative - selling D2C - comes with significant legal, technical, and operational complexity:

Legal: Manufacturers are legally unable to sell direct to consumer in a vast majority of states
Technical: supporting end-to-end, online sales requires piecing together disparate features with state-specific requirements including financing, insurance, titling and registration, and more. Most - if not all - solutions tackling these features are built for the in-person dealership use case and have not been translated into the online domain
Operational: managing all stakeholders (end buyer, state agencies, insurance carriers, lenders, & delivery partners) on a per-sale basis requires significant effort and intention

Manufacturers need an online sales channel and traditional methods don’t cut it. Selling direct themselves means limiting the number of markets they can reach and adopting another core competency. We provide an online sales channel out-of-the-box that comes with the benefits of a D2C sales motion without the legal or technological complexity of OEMs doing it themselves.

Growth

We’re partnered with iconic manufacturers who ship thousands of vehicle each year - from massive legacy OEMs to well-capitalized new EV entrants - and we’re poised for significant growth. We are backed by world-renowned investors including Y Combinator, the Tesla alumni fund, and some of the largest dealership groups and dealer owners in the US.

Here are some examples of our software in the wild: MOKE, LAND Moto, Maeving Motorcycles, Janus Motorcycles

About the role

Who are we looking for?

We’re looking for a full-stack generalist excited about learning new tools, overseeing the end-to-end development process for new features and products, and joining a small (but growing!), fast-paced team.

In our product, we have to solve for a wide variety of complex, independent tasks including - but not limited to - automated financing, insurance, titling and registration, identity verification, delivery coordination, e-signatures, etc. Building a singular, cohesive product accomplishing this huge variety of tasks is a big undertaking and requires close communication and collaboration across our entire team. While different areas of the codebase are owned and predominately maintained by certain engineers, we’re still small enough that projects will often take you across the entire tech stack.

In this role, you’ll be in constant communication with clients - both manufacturers (our customers) and the end users of the platform (vehicle buyers) - and will be expected to leverage feedback quickly and turn them into product improvements. While you’ll predominately be working on the core parts of our product (our checkout and buyer portal web apps and associated Node.js backend), from time to time we’ll have projects and tasks associated with automating internal (and external) processes, improving our dev infrastructure, fighting fires, and integrating new tools.

You’ll be given a significant amount of autonomy in this role. On the features and products that you build out, you will serve as the de facto owner with the loudest voice in the room on feature improvements and implementation design. You’ll have the power to advocate and fight for the projects you want to work on and you think should be prioritized; this will directly contribute towards our strategy decisions. Things are changing quickly on our side; if you expect long-term roadmaps with tasks defined months in advance, then this role probably doesn’t make sense for you.

Core infra:

Front end: React web apps
Back end: Node.js (serverless) backend using express.js and a NoSQL db
VC + CI/CD: Github / GH actions
SaaS tools: GCP + Firebase, Retool, Stripe, Segment, Mixpanel, Notion, Zapier, Cypress, and many more...

You certainly don't need to be experienced in all of these areas; but you should be excited to learn new skill sets & tools as you need them. We also expect you to bring some new knowledge and experiences you can share to help level-up the rest of the team.

Responsibilities

Lead key architecture decisions for the platform
Designing core, backend software components
Crafting and optimizing smooth front-end interfaces that thousands of users will use
Scoping and integrating with third-party APIs, including direct communication with all stakeholders (vendors, customers, etc) involved
Diagnosing and addressing bugs and performance issues
Producing high-quality, production-ready, readable, and maintainable code
Collaborating towards dev ops improvements to increase engineering team scalability and code reliability
Unblocking and supporting team members and customers

Please note: that this role is in-person with at least 4 days per week in the office in NYC!

Qualifications

Generality and ability to move across the stack:
- Backend: experience and proficient in Node.js + Express.js
- Frontend: proficient in javascript, React, a good eye for design (a nice-to-have and not strictly required), and (ideally) mobile design experience
Excellent communication skills: you’ll be working closely with other engineers on our team and with external customers, vendors, and end-users on a daily basis.
Demonstrated ability to thrive in ambiguous environments with competing priorities and tight deadlines
Product-driven engineering approach: a keen awareness towards the impact your code has on the user experience
High energy & motivated to work long hours to build an incredible product and revolutionize the vehicle sales industry

Benefits

Annual Salary Range: $115,000—$190,000 USD
Your offer will include a competitive salary, employee-friendly equity grant, and the following:
- Healthcare and dental coverage
- Paid lunch during the work week
- Regular team events, off-sites, and team-travel paid for by the company (we recently spent a few weeks in Maine, Norway, and South Africa!)
- Unlimited paid time off

Interview Process

To apply, please submit an application here or send your resume to founders@ekhodealer.com. We are excited to hear from you and explore how you can contribute to our team at Ekho!

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