Software Engineer - Communal
Calgary · Hybrid (Tue + Thu in office)
Communal (https://getcommunal.com) is software for community and member-based organizations: community centres, municipal recreation departments, nonprofits, cultural centres, summer camps. Over 500 organizations run on it.
We’re a small team in Calgary. We’re growing, and moving into new markets.
Why the work matters
For a lot of our customers, Communal is the first real software they’ve had. Before us it was a spreadsheet, a booking calendar, and a payment tool that didn’t talk to each other. Renewals got missed, halls got used for free, and someone spent Sunday retyping member details. Good software here saves time and keeps things running.
These organizations support community life for a lot of people, and most of the software industry has ignored them. We want Communal to be one of the biggest nonprofit software companies in the world.
The role
You’ll work across our Laravel and Vue codebase with our technical co-founder. You’ll take features from the first conversation about the problem through to production. When something breaks and a customer reports it, we fix it quickly. You should be fine dropping into code you haven’t seen before, finding the cause, and shipping a fix the same day.
This fits someone with about 1–3 years of experience who wants more ownership than they have now. Writing the code is only part of it. Getting it to production and keeping it solid for customers matters just as much.
There’s no big team to hand work off to. You’ll work across:
- Frontend: Vue interfaces used every day by non-technical staff and volunteers
- Backend: PHP/Laravel for payments, memberships, bookings, programs, reporting
- Product: figuring out how a feature should work, not only building to a spec
- Deploys and infrastructure: our CI/CD pipeline and the servers it runs on
The pace is fast. You’ll get pulled between things, and you’ll need to keep track of more than one thread at once.
Hybrid in Calgary. Minimum Tuesdays and Thursdays in the office.
Working with AI
We use coding agents every day to ship faster, and you’d use them too. You should already use them, and have a sense of where they help and where they don’t.
There’s also room to build AI into the product itself. Our customers are often volunteers and part-time staff with no IT department. Things like agents that draft renewal campaigns, catch invoices that never went out, or answer member questions. You’d help us decide where that fits in Communal, and build it.
What we’re looking for
- 1–3 years building web applications (any stack)
- You learn quickly and like doing it
- You write clearly and are easy to work with
- You’re fine when priorities change
- You care about the people using the software
- You don’t wait to be told what to do next
Nice to have, not required: PHP, Laravel, Vue, MySQL. Willing to learn ours? Apply anyway. Degree, diploma, bootcamp, or self-taught are all fine.
What we offer
- Stock options
- Health Spending Account
- Hybrid, in-office Tuesdays and Thursdays
- Direct mentorship and fast feedback
- Real ownership on a product used by organizations around the world
