Have you applied for a green card or visa yourself and thought that it could be a lot easier and faster?
OpenGreenCard is a pre-launch product looking to make applying for a green card as easy as doing your taxes or buying a plane ticket. We’re founded by Peter Xu and Harry Yu, the co-founders of Wanderlog, a one of the leading travel planning apps with 100,000s of users relying it to plan their trips.
Our founders are twin brothers. Peter worked as an engineer at Stripe and a consultant at McKinsey, and Harry as a product manager at Google. We’re an engineering and product-driven team: the founders studied computer science at Yale.
We’ve applied for various visas and green cards both on our own and with the help of lawyers, and every time, have felt that the process could be much easier. For hardworking immigrants to the US, becoming a permanent resident should not require investing dozens of hours and thousands of dollars.
We believe that more of life should be spent on people and activities you love, and less on filling forms and researching bureaucracies.
What you’ll do:As a founding engineer, you’ll be responsible on continuing work on the prototype of our product.
Build new features on a React and Next.js-based web app. (Our stack is Javascript (Typescript): modern React with Mantine as a framework on the web, and Next.js on the server.)
Design and decide what to build based on what would help green card applicants and drive growth. You won’t be handed a spec; you’ll be coming up with it!
Integrate AI-based APIs to make the user experience better.
Talk to potential users and integrate their feedback in your build.
Write tests and and build out engineering infrastructure. Our code is fully typed (Typescript) and tested.
Later, review code written by other engineers.
Be fast and nimble: figure out the best way to build new features at lowest cost in time and future technical debt.
This position is a full-time role reporting to the co-founders.
What you might work on:Form interfaces that make filling in a form easier than clicking through PDFs.
Validation back-end that checks for common errors in filling out immigration forms.
An image-to-text LLM/AI model integration that imports data for forms from existing documents.
Content management system integrations so that we can spread the word about our tool through search engine optimization.
Have applied for a green card or visa yourself, with minimal help from lawyers.
Have at least 2 years of experience doing full-stack, product development work.
Are a Javascript developer comfortable with React.
Are a product person: you’ve built products end-to-end before, and really care about the people who use them.
Are comfortable with picking up various technologies for the task at hand. We quickly evaluate libraries and tools that could help our product.
Are entrepreneurial: excited about joining as the first (and possibly only engineer) for a while and talking to users, doing product and design, and wearing a variety of hats.
Are communicative: will actively communicate challenges, questions, and clarifications.
Async coding challenge: We’ll first have you do an asynchronous programming challenge.
Non-technical interview and coding interview: If all goes well, we’ll have a video call where we have:
Non-technical chat: short 15-minute non-coding chat where we’ll try to understand what visas/green cards you’ve applied for, and whether you might be a good fit, and
Coding interview: 1 hour interview where you work on a quick program on your laptop in your preferred language.
1-2 more coding interviews: We’ll then do another 1-2 coding exercises over video call.
Peter Xu and Harry Yu are twin brothers. Peter shuttled between Los Angeles, Houston, New York, Tokyo, and Hong Kong as a consultant at McKinsey before settling down at Stripe as a full-stack engineer, where he worked closely with support teams to build tools that made support agents’ work more productive.
Harry worked at Google as a product manager on Hotel Search, Chrome, and finally Google Assistant for the past three, where he was one of the early PMs on the team.
For the last 5 years, they’ve been co-founders on Wanderlog, the #8 top-grossing travel app on iOS. Before building Wanderlog, they had built Coursetable (featured in the New York Times) and travel sites All the Flight Deals (a flight deals aggregator) and BookWithMatrix (a power-traveler flight search tool). They’re excited to share their knowledge and tools they’ve used to make applying for green cards and visas easier.
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