Onboarding

Welcome to Shorebird! We’re extremely glad you’re here.

This guide is here to walk you through the onboarding process. If you have any problems, please reach out to the team or your manager on Discord to get unblocked.

After Signing Employment Contract

You should get an email from Rippling after signing your offer letter. This will include instructions on how to set up your Rippling account and thus begin the digital parts of the onboarding process.
Rippling will also walk you through electing benefits based on your physical location and thus setting up payroll deductions for your first payroll.
- We mainly operate in the US which includes medical, dental, vision and life insurance as well as 401k.
- As we expand out to other locations we will work to provide the needed benefits given employment regulations.
Your manager will reach out to set up a meeting where we walk through this doc and also order you any hardware you might need on day one.
- Our customers tend to use many different devices to develop on including Windows, Mac, and Linux. We can supply you with any hardware that you prefer, given the business need for it, so to start please pick an operating system that you feel the most comfortable and productive with.

Start Week

While most of the items here will be completed on your first day it is required that they are completed by the end of your first week.

Employment Forms/Paperwork

There are a few tax forms required to fill out on your first day. This will be different based on the country you are employed in.

United States

Rippling will help you take care of this process for you and typically includes your W-4 and I-9. Please review the Form I-9 Acceptable Documents and be prepared to show these, typically via video call, to your manager during your first week.

Account Setup

Given that we are a remote first company we rely on many cloud services to conduct business operations. The main ones to have setup on the first day will be Google & Discord. Other services will depend on your business need.

We keep an up to date list of all of our vendors as part of our Privacy Policy. If you have a business need for a new service please work with your manager to get it added to this list before signing up.

All Employees

Rippling should have offered you a chance to pick your Google Workspace username as part of your offer paperwork. That account should be enabled as you start on your first day. You should get an email to your personal account with your temporary credentials to login and get everything setup.
If you have an existing Discord account you are welcome to use it. If you don’t have one you can create one at https://discord.com. You can join our discord server at https://discord.gg/shorebird. Message your manager and they will will be able to add to the “Birder” role which will allow access to our internal channels.
- This can be found at Server Settings > Roles > Birder > Add Member.
We utilize Ramp for our expenses. Work with your manager to determine the needed level of permissions and they can help get you setup there.

Engineering Team

You will use your existing GitHub account, but you will be added to the Shorebird organization. This is currently manual a manual process. Submit your GitHub username to your manager to start this process.
- Owners of the GitHub organization can add new members via the People View.
There are roles as part of our Google Cloud setup which you will need to be added to manually after joining based on your business need.

Operations Team

This list will change based on the business need your role has. Please work with your manager to determine and get onboarded to the systems you believe you need.

Business/Sales

Attio - Sales CRM
Stripe - Payment Platform

Finance

Stripe - Payment Platform
Pilot - Accountant
Mercury - Bank Account
Sphere - Tax Platform
Ramp - Expense Tool

ISO Compliance

As part of our ISO Compliance we have certain procedures that we need to follow during your employment. This is maintained for us via Oneleet. All employees will be added to Oneleet and your department/role will determine if the following policies apply to you.

Set up Oneleet Agent

The Oneleet Agent is a small application that works on the background of your machine to ensure that it is following our compliance guidelines. This is typically checking that things like the system firewall is enabled, your screen will auto lock after a given time period, and that your disk is using encryption. You can see the full list of data collected on their documentation. It checks these and other items periodically and reports them back to Oneleet.

You can download the agent from the Oneleet Portal and will need to follow their setup document.

Accept Policies

As part of our ISO Certification you are required to review and “sign” the policies that apply to your department/role. These can be found in the Policy section of the Oneleet Portal. These policies are kept in sync with our compliance section of this handbook so you can review them in either location at any time.

This is a one time process when becoming a new employee and will be reviewed on a yearly basis for updates and signatures.

Security Training

Upon starting and on a yearly basis you are required to go through our internal security training. This can be found in the Security Training section of the Oneleet Portal.

Use The Product

Please try the product, if you haven’t already. We are here to build something people want. What have you seen customers need in trying to use Flutter/Dart? We should build that.

While your eyes are still fresh, you are encouraged to write down any frictions you encounter in the product. Anything you see, likely was seen by 100s of customers and ignored, but we should fix it. You’ll find a folder in Google Drive where others have written friction logs if you wish to feel inspired.

Day to Day Operations

If your used to a remote first way of working most of this section may be known to you already. If this is your first role in this way of working please read the following sections carefully to get an understanding of how we work on a day to day basis. As usual, these are ever changing and evolving as the team grows so if you see something that doesn’t make sense or could be improved please work with your manager to do so.

Communication

We use Discord as our main communication channel. This allows us to have an open forum with our customers and community members and still have private areas for internal only discussions.

Please keep in mind that Discord is completely public. So far that’s been great, but the public internet also has a long history of not always being a great place. You should not feel any obligation to accept DMs on Discord, or use your real name or likeness. Although so far most of our communications default to public if you prefer to communicate in our private channels that’s also fine. Similarly, unwanted attention and spam on Discord are violations of our policies, please do not hesitate to ask in private channels for assistance removing Discord visitors.

All employees will be added to the “Birder” role on Discord which will also allow you to have moderation capabilities.
You should consider muting Discord, except for @mentions, if the amount of notifications is bothering you.
Current patterns have involved a most-days sync over VC and brief end-of-day updates in #standup. We expect these to evolve over time as we grow.

Email & Calendar

You do have an email address and calendar provided via Google Workspace, but so far we haven’t needed them much internally and is mostly used as an external communication tool.

Storage

We use Google Drive as our main storage provider. You are supplied with a personal drive for your own documents and we utilize Shared Drives for any company wide information that needs to be shared.

Please do not keep documents only on your local disk and instead default to using Google Drive.

Pay Periods

For US employees, paychecks are delivered every 2 weeks. Rippling should have offered you direct deposits. Let your manager know if you have any trouble getting set up.
For EOR employees, paychecks vary according to the country you are in. Check Deel’s FAQ to check the specific payment schedule for your country.

Engineering

Planning

So far we’ve been working out of GitHub projects for our planning. This is extremely useful given that we can easily pull in tickets filed by our customers into our projects boards.

For longer term discussions and design documents we typically store and work on these in Google Drive.

Code

All of our code is stored in GitHub.

Once you’ve been added to the Shorebird organization on GitHub, the best way to get started would be to clone the internal _shorebird repo. It will automatically clone the public repo shorebird for you as a submodule.

git clone git@github.com:shorebirdtech/_shorebird.git
cd _shorebird
git submodule init
git submodule update