Early/Core Engineering Team at Paper.xyz

Our mission is to make non-fungible tokens (NFTs) more accessible and useful.

We believe the future world blends with the virtual world where NFTs will represent identity, membership, and ownership. Our goal is to bring this technology mainstream – to the point where anyone can safely and easily purchase their first NFT without knowing anything about blockchain or crypto.

By offering embedded wallet infrastructure and familiar payment methods like credit card, Apple Pay, and Google Pay, we’re creating the ideal e-commerce experience for NFTs. We’re passionate about helping developers, creators, and brands make Web3 accessible to their audiences so they can focus on providing value like perks, loyalty programs, in-game benefits, and more.

‘Be entrepreneurial’ is one of our core values.

We’re a small team of self-starters. Many of us came from larger companies where there was too much process and little ownership. We’ve taken these learnings and adapted them to a fast-paced startup environment. The folks we hire are given real trust and autonomy to own projects end-to-end. From day one, you get full visibility into the business and play a key role in steering the company’s direction. Engineers don’t just ship code – you’ll also talk to customers and learn what features they need, help them integrate, and closely follow industry trends.

We encourage you to dream up moonshot ideas and run with them. For example, when purchasing his first NFT from favorite artist deadmau5, Phil experienced firsthand the painful buying process. They weren’t a customer at the time and he took the initiative to create a fully functional checkout (everything in Web3 is public!) and dropped the link in their Discord. This opened up talks with their creative development team and soon after their mint page featured Paper as the exclusive checkout!

Months after launching in 2022, we raised a $9.3M seed round. It’s an exciting time to join our small team since you’ll get exposure to all parts of the business and have a high degree of ownership as we continue to grow.

Everyone – from our CEO to our interns – interacts with our customers daily.

We sweat the details when it comes to developer and user experience. We have open lines of communication with many of our customers, gathering feature feedback, bugs reports, and roadmap requests. For example, as we noticed our customer base growing internationally, we added foreign currency support and localized our SDK to seven languages in under a week.

Our customers include artists, musicians, YouTubers, and popular brands. As our feature set continues to grow, we have a unique challenge in understanding the customer’s needs and navigating them to the best solution in the nascent Web3 space. Our platform helps foster community with bespoke experiences like writers’ room tickets and access to artists’ latest music. We even power airdropping custom NFTs using emails – no code required.

Self-service and excellent developer support is a key priority for us, and we track how quickly we respond and resolve customer issues. It’s a big differentiating factor since our customers will hear from us directly (no automated responses!) within 1-2 business days.

There’s ample room to grow your career.

We’re looking for people who prioritize continuous learning and personal development. If you’re motivated by unseen challenges and ambiguity, you’ll thrive here. Every team member is trusted to tackle business-critical tasks with junior team members given additional support if needed. That said, we’ll never leave you drifting out to sea alone – you’ll always have the full support of everyone on the team.

We purposefully work from our San Francisco office to facilitate faster in-person support and decision-making. Learning is more important than being right, and when mistakes happen, we prioritize learning from them openly and move forward. You should feel empowered to experiment.

If you’re curious about NFTs and aren’t well-versed in the space, don’t let that stop you from applying. As long as you’re eager to learn, we encourage you to check out our open roles. The industry evolves so quickly that you might even find yourself speaking at NFT events within a year!

Both our founders have technical backgrounds.

James and Edward co-founded Paper after witnessing firsthand how difficult the NFT buying experience was. Together, they bring years of technical and business experience – both previously founded startups with successful exits. Most of the team have engineering backgrounds (you can meet them here!), which allows us to have technical conversations and best understand our customers’ needs.

We don’t just keep an eye on the space because we have to. We genuinely want to! The team loves discussing local or industry news over lunch (catered every day at the office!). It’s energizing to work with incredibly smart and welcoming people who demonstrate genuine interest in what they’re working on. Whether sharing a meal together, going bowling, or taking a hike to enjoy Bay Area views, we love spending time together outside of the office, too.

We communicate with candor.

Transparency is key and we trust each other to speak up even when it’s uncomfortable. We believe fostering an environment to experiment and learn from mistakes is how we innovate and attract the most talented people. We check our egos at the door and share feedback on all business decisions. James (co-founder and CEO) often takes customer and investor calls on speaker so everyone gains full context and can share feedback after the call.

Our in-person culture also makes collaboration quicker and more effective. Whiteboarding or brainstorming enable teammates to be aligned and decisions to be made in minutes, not days. Sometimes we’ll gather for an impromptu meeting to discuss an urgent customer request, evaluate the tradeoffs, and kick off the project the same day.

We believe that having a complete understanding of the business allows everyone to make well-informed decisions independently and quickly. All product brainstorms, technical specs, customer call notes, and other decisions are documented in Notion and fully visible to the team. We review business metrics, product updates, highlights and low-lights, and the customer pipeline every week.

There is so much uncharted territory to explore with NFTs. We’re building the tools everyone will need to do so.

The idea that any digital or physical item can be uniquely digitized is extremely powerful. In just a few years, blockchain technology has completely transformed the world of art, music, gaming, and brand marketing. And there are vast implications for the future – such as replacing incumbents in industries like loyalty programs, concert tickets, membership clubs, and collectibles.

The NFT ecosystem is early and unlike established industries that haven’t seen major innovation in years, what we’ve learned six months ago is already less relevant today – that’s how fast the industry is moving! We share insights over Slack and often muse over the latest regulations, emerging trends, and companies entering the space.

While Paper has a clear mission, we rarely use the word quarters when discussing our roadmap because we ship major features in days or weeks, not months. There are few steps between having a good idea and deploying it to production – we’re both thinkers and do-ers!

Imagine building the first web browser or email client – that’s the point NFT infrastructure is at! We’re building embedded wallets, NFT checkouts, and other core infrastructure that every Web3 developer needs to create the best user experience.

Staying on top of cutting-edge tech is a given.

Standards and trends move especially fast in Web3, which forces us to constantly learn and adapt. There may be exciting new blockchain improvements coming up that we need to know about and support on day one. For instance, we added support for the ERC-721A NFT standard in a few days as we saw interest growing for it.

Our tech stack is written entirely in Typescript and uses React and Next.js frameworks. As a small team, we’re unafraid to pilot new technologies if it gets the job done well. For example, we’re already exploring where GPT-4 can significantly improve the developer onboarding or customer support experience. We practice a thoughtful “buy-not-build” culture to focus our team and not reinvent the wheel or spread our efforts too thin.

If you’re excited about being a leader in an area that will disrupt entire generations to come, get in touch!