Design Engineer Part Time

We are USB Club and we are hiring looking for a multi-faceted design engineer to help us push forward our sneaker net for designers, artists, DJs, writers, musicians, researchers, engineers.

Responsibilities

Ideally you are someone who can both design and code, with an acute understanding of the cultural, design, artist, music and research spaces.

Product Roadmapping, Research & Strategy

USB Club offers a lot of opportunity and potential, whether that's →

• the ability to access the network on the web in read-only or entry-level modes for folks who don't yet have their USB;
• the ability to bring your own USB or bless your existing USB with privileges to access the network and serve as a USB club key;
• the ability for artists to sell bespoke USBs with their own custom content, reaching their loyalists and superfans, and building back-channel secret networks to share their in-progress and impromptu work;
• or growing the platform more into a cloud backup system for DJs and touring musicians to ensure that their work is well preserved;
• or building integrations with are.na and other knowledge graph platforms so that files saved on USB can be accessible everywhere and vice versa;

We see the product development and iteration of the next chapter of USB Club as one of the more exciting and expansive parts of this role. We have some opinions about where to start but we expect the right person in this role to be someone who can build upon our vision and help realize their own ideas to the highest degree.

Product & Web Design

USB Club ships a MacOS desktop app & iOS app that you can access when you own one of our USBs. You use the desktop app to share files and collect files from other people, both onto your USB and more generally on the network.

You can think of it kinda like Limewire or a torrenting platform of the early 00’s. Something that happens behind the scenes, something where culture moves silently - if you know, you know.

Engineering

Our desktop app is an Electron app, our iOS app is a true native app. Our website is in Vue (although we’ll likely move to Next.js soon), and our API is in Typescript on PostgresQL.

We have some dashboards in Retool, and we integrate with Typeform & Airtable.

We’re hoping this individual can hold their own in the code, and confidently ship production-grade features without much hand holding.

Social, Posters, Campaigns & Messaging

A big part of USB Club is the posters, campaigns, and general messaging strategies that we put onto the internet. A big part of what we do is to build culture around the network. Not only should we be thinking about the product as something that can be improved and more accessible and more utilitarian but also as something where culture happens behind the scenes.

Time & Compensation

For now we expect that this is not a full-time role, although it will likely grow to in that direction. We expect that over the next 2 - 3 months a commitment of around 20 - 25 hours a week would suffice.

USB Club is an internal and cultural project so it's a really good place to get started working together, but we’d love to frame this as the start to a longer and more involved relationship, if that’s of interest!

Kindly submit a complete and thoughtful application, including relevant links that help verify your work experience and identity. Applications with missing or insufficient information will not move forward in the review process.