About Titanium Birch
We are a Singapore-based single family office started by Peter Burchhardt, co-founder of ExpressVPN. We have a diversified portfolio of investments covering many asset classes. We’re laying the foundations for our firm to exist for hundreds of years. In order to achieve this longevity and sustainability, we believe it is critical to find a software engineer to join our core team and build our systems from the ground up together.
As the first full-time software engineer at a tech-savvy investment firm, you’ll write code, operate systems, create and maintain open-source projects, assist in making investment decisions, and advise companies into which we’ve invested. Your work will involve elegant engineering, strong automated tests, fast CI and CD, elegant architecture, and clean code. You’ll work with a small team of people in our office, as well as some remote contractors and open-source friends.
What you’ll do
Some examples of the goals you’d take on:
- Make it easy for anyone on the team to understand our investment portfolio: both facts about the past, as well as answers to “what if?” questions about the future. That involves collecting and aggregating data from lots of sources, feeding them into specialised systems for accounting, portfolio reporting and risk management, and creating visualisations to let colleagues find insights.
- Minimise human toil. Automate any repeating process. For example: Keeping our accounting books up to date, safely making bank payments to our investments and vendors, calculating our cash needs over time, stress-testing our portfolio, etc.
- To help us make better investment decisions faster, enable access to information and insights about potential investments and the world at large. For example: we might consider 100 different investment funds. Let us quickly narrow that down to a set of 10 by filtering for certain criteria. The information is scattered across many data-providers with APIs, websites, internal databases, and PDFs. Let’s extract this data automatically (likely with LLMs) and save us time.
- Run due diligence on potential investments, with you contributing insights from a technology perspective and assisting the team with simulations and tools.
- Advise on the technical direction of companies into which we’ve invested, many of which aren’t tech companies and could benefit from your guidance.
- Help all colleagues work efficiently with sufficient security. Currently, our founder acts as our IT admin and would love your help, also in overseeing vendors. Over time, you might also take on some admin responsibilities for various IT tools such as Okta, Google Workspace, Slack, Atlassian, etc., generally managing them as infrastructure as code.
Some of our engineering principles:
- Take the long-term view. We invest over decades-long horizons, and we’d like our firm to exist even longer than that. Let’s build solutions that are both long-lasting and flexible.
- Automate as much as possible, especially our tests (which ideally describe behaviours so clearly that they function as documentation), as well as our processes for provisioning, deploying and monitoring.
What to expect as our team’s only full-time engineer:
- At least initially, you’ll be the only full-time engineer on the team. There may be part-time engineering contractors to bring specific expertise and act as your mentors, but they’ll likely be remote and temporary.
- Your immediate colleagues at the office will come from very different backgrounds: investing, economics, marketing, etc. You’ll learn a lot about things unrelated to engineering, and you’ll need to be very self-driven in guiding your own skill-growth in engineering.
- Over time, we plan to hire more people with coding skills, such as people with a quantitative finance background, but you might still be the only “generalist software engineer.”
For your role as an engineer, the company will expect these types of results:
- Satisfying your users
- Operating within acceptable risk-levels
- Building and protecting our brand
- Improving yourself and others
What you’ll need to succeed in this role
- You share our organisational values: https://titaniumbirch.com/culture
- 10 to 20+ years of professional experience as a software engineer.
- Strong skills in automated testing and a keen desire to keep improving. We view this as foundational to software engineering: “If we don’t yet know how to test something automatically, let’s first learn how to test it before building it.”
- Strong understanding of architectural principles at all levels, from systems to code.
- Broad interests. You’ll own a very wide range of problems and need to employ a diverse range of skills and tools to solve them. This role is not for you if you’re hoping to use only one particular technology or solve one particular type of problem.
- Love for self-directed learning. That’s especially important for this role since you’ll be the only full-time engineer on the team, and because you’ll encounter many “new things that you need to learn first.”
- Strong communication skills. There will be many times when you act as a type of product manager, interacting directly with your users (mainly your colleagues) to understand their needs in great detail and get their feedback on the solutions you build for them.
- An open mind. Some of our challenges relate to financial data and involve a general ledger, so you’ll need to learn some accounting. We’ll guide you through the learning.
- Experience working in organisations that deploy multiple times per day, test almost exclusively automatically, and provision their infrastructure mostly automatically.
- Languages and technologies: we’re quite open, and most of that will be up to you to decide. We’re currently mostly on AWS, though it doesn’t have to stay that way.
- Prior experience with financial software: nice to have, but not required.
What’s in it for you
- You’ll be a critical member of a team building an investment firm with big ambitions — from the ground up.
- Opportunity to learn a lot about things unrelated to engineering, such as investing and economics.
- Every day will be different, thanks to the wide variety of problems you’ll solve and skills you’ll use.
- Support to do elegant engineering: time, budget, very long-term perspective, and a culture of avoiding toil.
- Meaningful work at a stable company.
What your day-to-day life will be like working at Titanium Birch
- You’ll work in our office near Raffles Place MRT in Singapore.
- One WFH day per week.
- 25 days of paid leave per year.
- Flexible hours: Arrange your hours as you see fit, with the knowledge that meetings with colleagues are scheduled in advance between 09:00-18:00.
- Work sustainably and be healthy: we encourage everyone to get some exercise during the day.
- The company will give you cash to buy health insurance instead of enrolling in a group plan. This gives you the flexibility to select a plan that meets your needs. It also means you won’t be tied to the company should you (knock wood) develop a long-term health condition.
Interested? Our application process
- Submit your resume, cover letter (optional), and answer the following questions in the application form:
a) If possible, point us to some code you’ve written.
b) Briefly describe a security bug you wrote and what you learned from that experience.
c) Briefly describe your experience in automated testing.
d) In your current or recent role, roughly how much time passes between you writing a piece of code and it being in the hands of customers? - Video call
- Meet at our office for several hours, including time for you to ask lots of questions.
- Paid trial project
- Offer, and more meet-ups to let you ask anything you like
- As soon as feasible, and with your permission: reference checks with some of your former manager(s) and colleague(s)
