Grassroot Logo

About Grassroot

Address
44 Stanley Avenue, Milpark, Johannesburg, 2092
Company size
1-15 employees

Summary

What we do

We create simple to use, purpose-built, highly engineered tools that let ordinary people in low-income communities organize to take action. Our tools work on any phone, with any kind of connection, but without compromising on the quality of our backend or the quality of user experience. Our user base has grown by 500% in the last year, to reaching over 35,000 people, and our tools are in constant, high-frequency use, by thousands every day and week.

Why Work For Us

We work to bring the best possible engineering, with the judicious use of leading edge technology, to men and women doing brave work in difficult circumstances and with limited tools. We are increasingly pushing into the exploration and use of natural language understanding to provide a rich, seamless and natural command syntax for our users -- building interfaces that are likely to be world-firsts. Our small team and start-up culture means that even starting developers will have the opportunity to, and soon be expected to, contribute right at the edge of what we're doing.

In all, we offer a unique combination of the ability to work on new and emerging technology, while doing tremendous social good, in a team that offers the opportunity for rapid growth.

Our Culture

We are a start-up. We are small and agile, and we take risks. We have a sense of humour. We work with and for people who struggle with circumstances that are beyond difficult. We therefore find it hard to take ourselves too seriously -- everything we do is about our users, and everything that's not about our users is open skepticism.

Our Engineering Processes

We build agile. We deploy on average once every two weeks. We use JIRA and issue tracking where we need to, but not as a cult. We have a standard DevOps flow of GitHub, CircleCI, and CodeDeploy to AWS.

Our Hiring Process

We set an online assessment first, and ask for code samples. Following that, there is a 1-1.5 hour technical interview with our CEO, who also leads the dev team. Accepted contributions to OpenSource projects are a significant plus.

Perks at Grassroot

Flexible hours (we only care about delivery)
No dress code
Actually trying to change the world (not one more delivery app)
Bullshit free environment

Tech Stack

application and data

Amazon EC2
Amazon EC2
PostgreSQL
PostgreSQL
Javascript
Javascript
Python
Python
Java
Java
Spring Framework
Spring Framework

utilities

Amazon SES
Amazon SES

dev ops

GitHub
GitHub
Circle CI
Circle CI
Gradle
Gradle
Android Studio
Android Studio

business tool

Google Apps
Google Apps
Slack
Slack
JIRA
JIRA