News

Why You Should Come Work With Me At Omnia

Dan Wick

• 7 min read
Why You Should Come Work With Me At Omnia

Earlier this week, Omnia announced we raised a new $4 million round of funding. It's an exciting milestone and validates that the work we have been doing the past two years is connecting with the market and those that surround and support it. We are finding the right customers at an incredible rate and we have figured out how to keep them engaged and coming back at an even higher rate.

Yes, our transactional commerce growth of 400% YoY is strong and a great indication we are on to something. But the depth and breadth of the engagement of our users surrounding their transactions are what gets me out of bed every morning. The flywheel we have built is working to surround the purchase experience in a way that didn't exist before.

This is the most exciting technology and business I have worked on in my entire career. The reason is that I get to build cool stuff with the smartest people I have ever worked with. Because we have been able to find product-market fit for that cool stuff we can keep building and adding more of the smartest people.

Additional capital in the bank means nothing if we are not able to put it to work. The good news is we are extremely ready and prepared to put this to work.

That's potentially where you come in. I want to work with more smart people and add you to our awesome team. We are hiring across many areas of engineering, data science, and product. The positions are listed below.

But first I'd like to give you a lay of the land for all things Omnia. This is a bit long, but if you're the right fit for us, this should all resonate with you.

Is this you?

In addition to the specific roles listed below, we are generally looking for mature, driven, curious people who have very strong communication skills. To date, we have been very fortunate to hire some of the brightest people I've ever worked with across the entire company.

A Players want to work with other A Players.

Engineering

Data Science

Product & Design

Warehouse & Operations

What We Are Building

Personalized commerce through geospatial context. That's the shortest way I can summarize it, but there is obviously a lot more to it. Identifying the right fishing products you need for any given fishing trip is an overwhelming and time-consuming process. Big box regional selection both in-store and online is not optimal. Local tackle shops and smaller retailers have limited supply and are not operationally enabled to get you the product you need efficiently.

Omnia provides a service that enables unique shopping and information gathering down to the lake level so that customers can find what they need when they need it.

Here are some specific key areas of our business and stack that our team and new team members would work on building out.

Product catalog

We have 18,000 SKUs with a proprietary taxonomy down to very specific product attributes that allow us to write recommendation algorithms against the catalog to make very specific recommendations. Our SKU count will continue to grow at an exponential rate as we move into our new warehouse.

Waterbodies (lakes) data set

We have over 200,000 pins for lakes across the US. Each lake contains data about the species that inhabit it, water clarity, and very specific geolocation data. Given all of that data, we can match conditions and seasonality to recommend products and content in exact scenarios.

Fishing Reports (structured UGC)

The key to any good feedback loop is the response from the userbase as to the efficacy and specific utilization of the recommendation provided. Fishing report generation is the fastest-growing part of our dataset and has the potential to strengthen our recommendations exponentially.

Recommendation Engine

As volume through the platform has increased, the opportunity to train and model inferences against the data mentioned above (products, transactions, water bodies, fishing reports, etc). We are now prepared to move beyond the insights and analytics of the behavior and start writing code against the models to allow for more intelligent recommendations.

Backend APIs and Services

Before we began developing any UI, we spent months modeling the data and writing services to allow for the personalized experiences we knew were going to need. Everything is exposed through APIs obviously.  This part of the stack of what we are building is crucial to enabling more growth in the quality of the services and the elegance of our UIs.

Frontend UIs

Up until today, the web app on omniafishing.com has been our flagship user experience. It's been responsive for mobile since inception and it will continue to be the primary experience for many new and existing customers as they discover more and more of our content and products through SEO. The release of our iOS and Android app is imminent and I'll be happy to share more 1:1 about this after it is released.

What We Build With

I'll keep this somewhat brief, but we are happy to go in deep on more of the nuances within each discipline. We like to keep things flexible so that as things emerge that the team would like to use we can make that happen.

  • Web Frontend - React (Typescript) - our web app is server-side rendered without a framework and uses a Ruby API. Mapbox for geospatial visualization.
  • Native Mobile - React Native (Typescript)
  • Backend - Ruby on Rails, PostgreSQL, AWS (EC2), Containers (Terraform), BigQuery (data lake for BI)

(If you're curious if the trajectory of your engineering tour of duty at Omnia could eventually include working on web3, the answer is yes it very well could in the future. It's not the focus of active development today and we are not making PFP NFTs of Fish Punks or Fishing Apes. But if you would like to join me down the rabbit hole to talk about smart contracts, progressive decentralization, tokenization, and more... I'm your huckleberry.)

Engineering Philosophy

As far as engineering methodology, I would sum it up as common sense agile. We use Jira for stories and bug tracking. We do light-weight sprint planning usually as a part of standup but sometimes a quick meeting if we need to discuss. There is not a standing sprint planning or retro ceremony schedule. Sprints are usually a week, but sometimes two if something gets big and requires sustained heads-down days of work. We release to production at least weekly or more than that if needed. We use Airtable to manage our roadmap out about one calendar year. Sometimes you do actually need a Gantt chart.

Work Environment

You're probably wondering about remote work. We have a physical space where today 15-18 team members come into work most days of the week. Some work remotely when they need to and then come in when it makes sense. Others rarely come in or only when needed. Some are 2 miles away and others are 5,000. Some people I see face to face every day, others I haven't met in person yet. But everyone gets their work done and we all stay aligned through regular communication. Other than a daily stand-up, there are no other standing meetings for the engineering team. We obviously Slack as things come up and jump on a video call as needed, but we keep the meeting and ceremony overhead as low as possible.

Our current office and warehouse are in Golden Valley, MN. In the second half of 2022, we are moving into a much larger space mostly to accommodate the warehouse growth and expansion, but it will also include much more office, working, and meeting space. That exact location is still TBD, but it will be within 10 minutes of our current space and likely in the Southwest Metro of Minneapolis.

Diversity Equity & Inclusion

As a member of the LGBTQ+ community, diversity and inclusion are personal priorities for me. As a co-founder and leader of Omnia, I can also say that diversity and inclusion are company values that are shared across leadership and the entire team. We have a wide range of backgrounds on our team and it shows in the quality of our products and services. There is always work to be done within adding diversity to our team and we are committed to making it happen with this large hiring push and into the future.

The Greater Good and Giving Back

The nature of our business and space is directly aligned with preservation. Preservation of our lands, bodies of water, and the animals that inhabit the environment. That's why we have partnered with Sportsmen For The Boundary Waters from day one. We've not only co-hosted events with them and sponsored them, but we also are in the process of building experiences within the Omnia platform that highlight BWCA to help people understand how to visit the area and to take good care of it.

Compensation

If you are comfortable in your current position at Target working 20 hours a week cashing an inflated check and waiting around for your huge (for now) yearly bonus and public stock grants to hit, Omnia isn't a good fit for you at this stage of your career. There is absolutely nothing wrong with a position like that and I 100% mean it when I say "Good for you!" and you should stay put.

Omnia compensates competitively and we will meet market rates. For the right person who is a dedicated high-contributor, that can include stock options. We offer full medical and dental. We currently do not offer a retirement/401k program, but as we continue to grow that may become part of the mix.

PTO

PTO is offered but not tracked. We trust our team to take the time they need, including days/weeks of vacations completely unplugged. Taking time out of the workday to tend to family or personal obligations is something we all do on a daily basis. We encourage our team to take days and parts of days to get out on the water and out into nature. As long as it's communicated, common sense PTO is our official policy.

Conclusion

If you made it this far, I thank you for reading and hope it's a good indication you are interested in what we are doing. If are interested, please take a look at all of our job openings. Shoot me an email if you have feedback or questions. I look forward to hearing from you.