The Bonanza Story

When Bill Harding started an online marketplace in 2007, he sure as hell didn't know what he was getting into.

Bill was no stranger to doing business online. For years, he'd been making cash on the side by refurbishing games and electronics from Craigslist, and flipping them for healthy margins on eBay. He'd even started scaling up to flipping cars and trucks.

But as his business scaled, he became increasingly frustrated that even the top online marketplaces were far from "good enough." Clunky, unreliable, and (worst of all) ugly - they seemed to be doing their best to make buying and selling as painful and time consuming as humanly possible.

That's when he realized that this was a massive opportunity. He was going to rise to the challenge and reinvent online commerce by building the fastest, most efficient, and most beautiful place to buy and sell products online.

Sure, his friends thought he was nuts when he set out to start an online marketplace that would do e-commerce better than well-established incumbents like Craigslist and eBay.

But they couldn't see the future like he could - and now that future is here. Just a handful of years after Bill's first deploy of Bonanza.com, it has become a thriving, popular, and profitable website used by millions of delighted buyers and sellers every month.

It hasn't been easy. In that same time period, nearly a dozen well-funded online marketplaces have come and gone. But the Bonanza team's drive to make the absolute best e-commerce tools has payed off big, for online merchants and shoppers alike. That's why Bonanza has been showered with awards, including "Best Bootstrapped Startup," "Best Ease of Use,"and more. Most recently, the e-commerce seller community recognized our commitment to their needs by voting us "Most Recommended Marketplace", "Best Customer Service", and "Best Communication" in the 2021 eCommerceBytes Sellers Choice survey.

Our Approach to Hiring

We look for two key components in any engineering candidate: team/culture fit, and engineering skill.

We evaluate team/culture fit by having candid conversations on the phone and (in non-pandemic times) at the office, by inviting you for lunch with the team, and by making sure we have every opportunity to find out whether Bonanza is a place where you can be happy and thrive while we build awesome software together. To be successful here, you should have a positive attitude, a sense of humor, and a penchant for accomplishing as much as possible during a standard workday.

We evaluate engineering skill by asking you detailed questions about your career accomplishments, by viewing work samples from Github or elsewhere, and by asking you to perform a skills assessment on CoderByte.

We're picky about who we add to the team, because we have high standards and low turnover. But we also move quickly when we find a strong candidate, so the entire process from application to hire usually takes just a handful of days.

Why Work With Us

We believe Bonanza provides entrepreneurs with the best platform for their online stores, and we've got the growth trajectory to support that belief. Alexa now calls us the biggest marketplace this side of Etsy. In 2014 alone, we doubled the size of our product catalog, tripled our sales revenues, and saw our average seller double the size of their monthly sales.

For an engineer, Bonanza is a dream come true for several reasons. Here are a few:

• The CEO is an engineer.
• We're in a gorgeous open office, but it's quiet and productive during work hours.
• As the sole engineer on our lean team, your insights into the site will shape our roadmap and the site.
• You get to choose your own customized dev gear - Linux, Mac, Windows, whatever works best for you is fine with us. (But let's be honest, it's probably not Windows.)
• You push new code directly into master, and it gets deployed within a few days - we trust you. Scary? Or liberating?
• Bonanza is a very large Rails code base, yet is well-organized and supremely DRY.
• Bonanza has a huge customer base - it's exciting to work on a site for millions of users each month.
• We're working on novel technical problems that have never been solved. You'll help to invent the next world-first e-commerce technology.