Christian Care Ministry’s mission is to connect and equip Christians to share their lives, faith, talents, and resources with others. We primarily do so throughMedi-Share, but as an association of churches, we’re rapidly expanding our “ministry portfolio” and we think technology will be at the center of accomplishing that goal. That’s where you come in. We need help creating and supporting applications (mobile + browser) for the future products and projects we’ve got in the proverbial “hopper.”
But before we go any further, you need to know if you’ll like working with us. We think you will.
A bit about us:You already know the mission of Christian Care Ministry (CCM). We have about 580 employees in various states, but most of them are either at our headquarters in Melbourne, FL, or our Colorado Springs, CO branch. Medi-Share has been growing in every way imaginable since about 2010. It has become commonplace for our CFO to say things like “We’ve grown 30% year over year …again” at seemingly every quarterly employee town hall meeting. We’re extremely humbled and grateful to the Lord for the growth.
Christian Care Ministry is a community of Christians that requires its employees to share its Christian religious beliefs and practices. CCM complies with all anti-discrimination laws applicable to religious employers.
About the role:This position serves on the New Product Engineering Team in a Product Team setting. This small, sub-department of our IT team (which is currently under 10 people) is mostly remote. Their main focus has been making some dreams of the leadership team come true (well, at least the dreams that involve amazing code :).
Life as an Employee with CCM’s New Product Engineering Team:We work really hard to make working here an amazing experience. It’s hard to find great talent like you, but if you pick us, we want to keep you for a long time. We have a team full of truly exceptional people—the kind you’ll be excited to work with. Here’s how we operate:
Do you prefer mountains or oceans?
While the majority of the NPE Team is distributed, it is our overwhelming preference that you live near our Colorado Springs, CO office or our headquarters in Melbourne, FL. However, with modern tools, proximity doesn’t influence productivity and if absolutely necessary, we can discuss an exception (as long as it’s a state listed below that we already are a registered employer within). For this job in particular, we do need some collaboration though, so just make sure you have a reliable internet connection, of course.
No Crazy Hours
The New Product Engineering Team is operating in “start up” mode. This means that we work hard and smart to get projects completed in a reasonable timeline. On occasion, there may be instances when extra time is needed (usually around a product launch or a really big release), but those are pretty infrequent. Basically, we commit you to at least 6 hours of coding per day in our Sprints and as long as you get the work done, we’re okay with when you get it done. Just be available when the team may need your help, or when you may need their help. Sometimes life happens in the middle of the day, and we understand that. We also think “more meetings” means less time for coding so we protect your time. We have one morning stand-up at 10am EST where we find out when there could be overlap that day. Oh, one more cool thing about the only meeting you attend – we “eat our own dog food” and close each stand-up praying for Medi-Share members’ needs listed in our mobile app.
Up Your Game
We’re serious about helping you improve your craft. We budget for it by giving you those extra 2 hours per workday to collaborate or learn. The stack we generally work on is relatively new so taking time to hone in your skills is pretty imperative. We send members to conferences or webinars as we need to. We love seeing our people growing.
Now, back to you, our new Full Stack Developer…
This is the part where we describe the experience necessary to be considered for the position.
You’re a skilled developer, but maybe you haven’t gotten a chance to prove it yet professionally. We can give you that chance.
But before you get too excited, let me explain. We only hire great developers, and this position is no exception. When we ask you to write or debug code during our interviews, you’ll do so confidently. You might not be able to show us 5 applications you’ve shipped, but you can point to something recent you’ve spent significant time coding that you’re really proud of, like your university project, your open source contributions, or your project at your last job. If we ask your professors, classmates, or coworkers about you, they’ll have great things to say.
In short, we won’t teach you how to be a good programmer, since you already are, but we can certainly help you be a better, professionally-experienced programmer.
Our ideal candidate either has a college degree in computer science, or if not, 2+ years of recent, solid professional programming experience. Our especially ideal candidate has experience with either Nodejs or Reactjs. Having only done that in your free time is fine. That tells us you are curious enough to learn on your own.
Our stack contains a very healthy JavaScript client utilizing Heroku, Nodejs, Reactjs, and a few others. CCM is in the process of migrating to Salesforce so we often interact with their APIs. For our mobile apps we’re using React Native, because, well, basically, it’s awesome (and we really think our philosophies of “API First” and “Learn Once, Code Everywhere” are going to be the norm in the near future). Our backend API servers use either Ruby on Rails or Nodejs/Express, with PostgreSQL and Redis as our data layer. Despite those being our “sweet spots” before we take on a new product, we pick the stack that works best for that solution.
You’re the one we’re looking for if you:
Live in (or, if you want to live in) one of these states: AL, CO, FL, GA, IL, IN, OH, TN, TX, VA, WA, or WV.
Are curious how things work, you are self-motivated and self-driven.
Are an excellent developer and can adapt to new languages quickly.
Write code that is easy for other programmers to understand and use.
Thrive with directions like:
“Here is the mock up for feature X. How do you think we should approach this?”
"Check out the Jira story and play a bit with library X on GitHub. This might solve our problem Y. Let’s discuss the pros and cons tomorrow."
"This component needs to be re-architected to allow for X. How do you think we should do it and why do you think that’s a good idea?"
Are excited to work across multiple platforms with different technologies.
You got a smirk on your face when you saw you could work on the stack listed above, AT A MINISTRY!
As you’ve read this job description, you realize this team obviously is comprised of people who you’d enjoy spending a work week with. (ended that sentence with a preposition, we’re not paid for our grammatical skills)
Bonus Points
You already are a Medi-Share member or would want to join membership even if you didn’t work here.
You’ve built stuff using React Native (even if it was for your mom’s bingo club or something crazier).
Next Steps
Super important stuff that sounds like it was written by lawyers:
This job description in no way states or implies that these are the only duties to be performed by the employee(s) incumbent in this position. Employee(s) will be required to follow any other job-related instructions and to perform any other job-related duties requested by any person authorized to give instructions or assignments. This document does not create an employment contract, implied or otherwise, other than an "at will" relationship.
Christian Care Ministry is committed toservingthe Lord and our membership with excellence. Asemployeeswe arecommitted to adheringto the same standard of Biblical principles of lifestyle and health as required for membership in our Medi-Share program which include:
Have a verifiable Christian testimony indicating a personal relationship with the Lord Jesus Christ, and profess theStatement of Faith
Attend a fellowship of believers, regularly and actively support that ministry, and live under the discipline of that body
Share the conviction that believers are to bear one another’s burdens according to Galatians 6:2
Believe the Biblical doctrine that their bodies are temples of the Holy Spiritand thereforeare to be kept pure
Must not engage in sex outside of traditional Christian marriage
Cannot use tobacco or illegal drugs in any form, or abuse legal drugs or alcohol
How To Apply
Apply here. In your cover letter, introduce yourself and explain why this position is of interest to you, and why you would be a great fit.
Please include links to apps you’ve built or anything else that makes you look good, and describe your role in building those apps. (If they’re internal, you can skip the link part.)
If you have a prepared resume, attach it in PDF form. If you don’t have a resume because you aren’t even sure you’re looking to change jobs, that’s fine! An informal list of your work and education history are all we’re looking for. Plus, you’ll see at our site we ask for a lot of the same info anyway.
Please complete the following questions, and include them with your cover letter. This shouldn’t take you very long.
What are your two strongest programming languages? Is there another language that you’re curious to learn next?
If you were interviewing a prospective candidate for this position, what would be a good interview question to ask to find out if a candidate really knew their stuff?
In a 2-3 sentences, what has your life with Jesus looked like over the last 3 weeks? There’s no wrong answer.
There will be a few other things if we get past the first interview, but we’ll cover that later. We even like doing our hiring on an iterative basis.
