UpCodes provides tools to help architects and developers design safe, accessible buildings that speed through government approval. Inefficiencies and mistakes navigating complex building codes cost companies billions yearly in the US alone. Our SaaS platform enables industry professionals to find, understand, and apply the codes so they can build better.

ABOUT US

UpCodes (YC S17) is a comprehensive compliance and product research platform that accelerates design to construction in the AEC industry. The construction industry suffers from unnecessary costs and complexity, and every year, billions of dollars are wasted on rework. We’re committed to delivering easy-to-use tools that help designers and builders spend less time finding the right compliance and product resources and more time designing and building. 

With over 750,000 monthly active users, the challenge lies in managing and meeting increasingly comprehensive and rapidly changing codes, assemblies, and building products—everything that creates the housing, schools, hospitals, bridges, and train stations that we use every day.

ABOUT THE ROLE

We operate in a highly complex and opaque domain and strongly believe in working with our users to find easy-to-use solutions. We’re looking for a uniquely talented Product Manager to own our core product (the heart of everything we do) and shape its future direction. We need someone who can wrangle complexity, talk with users, and come up with sensible, simple ideas.

As our second Product Manager, you’ll collaborate closely with the CEO, playing a pivotal role in maintaining our competitive edge as we continue to grow as a compound startup. You’ll also work closely with our users and engineering team to create hypotheses, test your assumptions, and develop specs. Given that deciding what to build and ironing out the details is one of our toughest challenges, you'll find that we have a very open environment where we encourage debate and input from lots of stakeholders.

WHAT YOU’LL DO

We’re a product company. As a Product Manager, you’ll have a direct and significant impact on our product and the company's future. At UpCodes, you’ll be responsible for…

• User research: We keep our NPS in the 99th percentile by building the product in close contact with our users. You’ll own user research and discovery efforts to gain a deep understanding of our industry, engage with customers, and understand their needs, along with studying analytics to help inform product decisions. 
• Roadmapping and prioritization: You’ll work closely with the founders to set the product strategy and roadmap. You’ll also set the priorities for the engineering team. They do the “project management” tasks to organize the tickets based on the priorities set by the product team. 
• Working cross-functionally with our talented and motivated team: We believe the best solutions come from the exchange of various perspectives, so we’ll want to harness this collective wisdom to drive the product forward and execute our product strategy. 
  • You’ll work with our subject matter experts to understand the industry's challenges and translate them into user value. 
  • You’ll develop UI/UX solutions with our design team by creating wireframes and keeping a loop of constant feedback. 
  • You’ll drive collaboration across teams, integrate different perspectives, and establish clear decisions.
• Communication and documentation: We’re a fully distributed, remote team with an async culture, which means that in order to be successful, we need to be able to communicate efficiently in writing. Whether it’s a product brief, PRD, Slack message, we ensure every decision is documented.

THE IDEAL CANDIDATE

• Experience in product management: You have at least 1 year of end-to-end product development experience in a tech startup environment.
• User-centric: You’re comfortable talking to users. You’ve conducted user interviews in your previous roles and are excited about their potential for making informed product decisions. 
• Design sense: You believe that good design is about more than just aesthetics, and you strive to build products that are simple, accessible, and easy to use. 
• Open to feedback: You’re good at managing feedback and using it as a driving force for your work. You thrive in a fast-paced environment, handling multiple initiatives and perspectives simultaneously while maintaining an optimistic outlook. You're open-minded and not afraid to learn through trial and error.
• Strong communication skills: With excellent communication and interpersonal abilities (and a good sense of humor), you’re capable of working effectively with both users and a remote, global team. 
• Data-driven: You use data to set the right objectives and find the most effective solutions. Your decisions are backed by clear, defendable reasoning, but you also appreciate the role of intuition and conviction. 
• You sweat the small stuff: As a detail-oriented person, you raise the team's standards for quality and attention to detail.
• Bonus qualities: Experience working with compliance tech, and with tools like Amplitude and Figma is a plus.

Job Type: Full-Time

Location: 100% remote

US-based comp range*: $120k - $185k

Latin America-based comp range*: $72k - $111k (USD)

Canada-based comp range*: $96k - $148k (USD)

Please click here to apply - we only look at candidates who apply directly. Thank you!

Tech Stack

• Python 3
• Typescript
• Flask
• Postgres
• Redis
• Heroku
• AWS

Why Join Us?

• Our product is already at 250,000 monthly active users. To put that in perspective, there are ~1.5M architects and structural engineers in the US, so we already have a significant chunk of the market.

• This is one of the construction industry's worst problems and we're the only ones solving it.

• We're a YCombinator company, backed by Liquid 2 and Foundation Capital. We've been approached for acquisition more than once, but declined because we believe this could become something big.

• The work is meaningful. Cheaper construction means more affordable housing, airports, hospitals, schools, etc. Oh and we're fighting the good fight (try googling "Can the Law be Copyrighted?")

• We believe the best perk is working with talented colleagues, so we're keeping the team small and experienced / talented.

Example Projects

• Create an internal tool that allows contractors to write formulas to identify when a building code section applies for a user's building, so we can help them find relevant information.

• Add users' bookmarked code snippets onto blueprint PDFs (and have some kind of UI for them specifying the right area in the PDF or detect automatically).

• Create Rap Genius-style annotations on sections of building code, to better explain it.

• Past project example: for links to other building code sections, create a preview modal that pops up similar to Wikipedia's previews.