Hardcover Open Roles

Hi all! Here are all of the current open roles on the Hardcover Team. All of these roles have responsibilities, with you as the point person on specific needs for the team – both internal and external.

Joining the Hardcover team isn’t volunteer work, it’s actual work. We’re building up Hardcover to be a social network for readers that’ll stand the test of time, and for that we’re looking for people who are in it for the long term.

Before listing out the roles, here’s a little bit more about how we work, and what each team member is responsible for.

We are a completely remote team that keeps in contact primarily through Discord.
Everyone on the team tracks their hours spent working using Toggl.
All team members are earn equity based on what they contribute to the company, calculated using the Slicing Pie method (You can watch some great videos on it here: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7).
Equity is calculated based on hours worked, money contributed and other Slicing Pie metrics.
All core team members are expected to work at least 5 hours a week (most weeks, we all have lives).
Everyone on the team knows how much everyone else makes (which is easy since we all make the same amount 😂), how much equity everyone has, and our future plans.
We’re not currently profitable, so all contributions for the moment earn equity, not cash.
We have a high level of trust for each other.
Contribute when you want to, how you want to.
We all want to build Hardcover into something that lasts.
Join a monthly Team video call to touch base and plan out the next month together.
When/if Hardcover becomes profitable, we’ll switch from earning equity to a salary model (TBD).

If that sounds exciting, here are our open roles as of April 30, 2025.

You can apply to any of these roles here.

Senior Developer in Ruby on Rails and/or React.js (2+)

The main application you’re viewing in a Ruby on Rails application with a React.js front-end, using Inertia.js. We’re looking for more people to work on this application, either on the Rails side, the React side or both (preferance to people with experience in both).

Currently, we’re aiming to open source the application, which is where the immediate work would be contributing to. In time we have a bunch of fun things down the line – Discussions, book clubs, author pages, and more.

Since we’re open sourcing the application, we also want people who have a history of being great communicators. You’ll be interacting with the community on Discord, in Pull Requests on GitHub, and potentially on other channels too.

This is a senior role, that should have at least 3+ years experience in either or both technologies. If you’re just getting started with Ruby or React, or you’ve only done a few small apps for fun with it, I’d suggest contributing to our Open Source initiative first (once we launch that).

On the Ruby on Rails side, we’re looking for someone who feels comfortable executing on a product design – planning out the database tables, routes, models and how it will all come together with React.

For React.js, we’re looking for someone who cares deeply about the user experience. This means making it fast, easy to user and fun!

We’re looking for multiple developers for this role to build out a development team.

Apply for the Senior Developer in Ruby on Rails and/or React.js role.

Senior Librarian (2)

We’re looking for two Librarians interested in being promoted to Senior Librarians. We’re prioritizing librarians who have already made contributions, have joined the Discord and are looking for ways to make even more of an impact.

Senior librarians, alongside Jeff (our Lead Librarian) will be responsible for a number of data-focused areas:

Review and Approve/Reject Reports made from the site (data changes, merging duplicates approving other librarians).
Helping to create and implement processes that improve workflow for Librarians and data across the site.
Help to plan new Librarian Tools in order for a small team with a passionate Librarians can make an outsized impact.
Give direction and answer questions from other Librarians and Readers in the Discord.
Help reply to Data Update requests on Discord.

We have some admin tools for Senior Librarians today, but you’d be a part of helping us decide and prioritize what tools are built next.

Since we’re prioritizing existing Librarians for this role, the first step would be to Apply as a Librarian, be accepted, and contribute – likely be improving books in your library.

Apply for the Senior Librarian role.

Community Support

We get a lot of feedback from the community. This comes through many main channels:

Email, using HelpScout
Discord, in the #bugs-and-feedback channel
Noora, our public Roadmap
Github, with issues, and later Discussions

This role would be responsible for responding to users, answering questions and helping the team to understand which issues are impacting users the most. It’s part Community Support, part Project Manager.

The end result of this is that every issue people bring up is in GitHub Issues, our issue tracker. As we move towards open source, this will be the place where we identify anything that needs to be worked on.

For this role, we’re looking for a patient, good communicator, with high empathy and a love for helping people. You’ll be the first person at Hardcover many people ever interact with. We want people to leave feeling seen – even if we’re not able to fix their problem right away.

Apply for the Community Support role.

Social Media & Community Manager

As a team of developers, we haven’t done the best job at social media marketing. 😅 Ironic for a social media company, right?

This role would likely be based on the persons skills, but would include the following:

Staying on top of social media channels for Hardcover mentions and being part of the conversation.
Posting across different channels using Buffer (or another multi-post tool).
Improving our Discord to make it more community oriented.
Helping to plan what other community-focused changes we can make to Hardcover in the future.

What we don’t want is a marketer. This is a role for someone who’s excited about Hardcover, and would like to create content about that! You should have some history of creating content online or managing a community on Discord.

Apply for the Social Media & Community Manager role.

DevOps / IT Manager

Recently we’ve started migrating our servers from Heroku to Digital Ocean. Most things are there, but there’s still a lot we need to figure out: alerting, logging, better recovery from failure, etc.

This role would focus on improving what we already have from a technical side and making it rock solid. This isn’t about re-architecting our site, at least not right away. It could involve migrating a few more services from Heroku to Digital Ocean though.

For this role, you should have some experience managing servers in multiple environments (production, staging, etc), working with Docker, Grafana, and Prometheus. I see myself and this role being the only people who would have production access to everything. That also means you’d be the only other person beside me to help when things go down. 😅