Position

Senior Backend Engineer to join fast-growing education startup transforming the way 6.5+ million K-12 studentslearn Math, English, Social Studies and more.

What you tell your friends you do

“You know how teachers in public schools are always overworked and overstressed with 30 kids per classroom and never ending state tests? I make their lives possible and help their students make it pretty far in life”

What you really will be doing

Architect, design and develop new web applications, tools and distributed systems for the Front Row ecosystem in Haskell, Flow, PostgreSQL, Ansible and many others. You will get to work on your deliverable end-to-end, from the UX to the deployment logic

Mentor and support more junior developers in the organization

Create, improve and refine workflows and processes for delivering quality software on time and without incurring debt

Work closely with Front Row educators, product managers, customer support representatives and account executives to help the business move fast and efficiently through relentless automation.

How you will do this

You’re part of an agile, multidisciplinary team. You bring your own unique skill set to the table and collaborate with others to accomplish your team’s goals.

You prioritize your work with the team and its product owner, weighing both the business and technical value of each task.

You experiment, test, try, fail and learn all the time

You don’t do things just because they were always done that way, you bring your experience and expertise with you and help the team make the best decisions

What have we worked on in the last quarter

We have rewritten our business logic to be decoupled from the Common Core math standards, supporting US state-specific standards and international math systems

Prototyped and tested a High School Math MVP product in classrooms

Changed assigning Math and English to a work queue metaphor across all products for conceptual product simplicity and consistency

Implemented a Selenium QA test suite 100% in Haskell

Released multiple open source libraries for generating automated unit test fixtures, integrating with AWS, parsing and visualizing Postgres logs and much more

Made numerous performance optimization passes on the system for supporting classrooms with weak Internet bandwidth

Team

We’re an agile and lean small team of engineers, teachers and product people working on solving important problems in education. We hyper-focus on speeds, communication and prioritizing what matters to our millions of users.

Requirements

• You’re smart and can find a way to show us.
• A track record of 5+ years of working in, or leading, teams that rapidly ship high quality web-based software that provides great value to users. Having done this at a startup a plus.
• Awesome at a Functional Programming language: Haskell / Scala / Clojure / Erlang etc
• Exceptional emotional intelligence and people skills
• Organized and meticulous, but still able to focus on the big picture of the product
• A ton of startup hustle: we’re a fast-growing, VC-backed, Silicon Valley tech company that works hard to achieve the greatest impact we can.

Benefits

• Money, sweet
• Medical, dental, vision
• Incredible opportunity to grow, learn and build lifetime bonds with other passionate people who share your values
• Food, catered lunch & dinner 4 days a week + snacks on snacks
• Room for you to do things your way at our downtown San Francisco location right by the Powell Station BART, or you can work remotely from anywhere in the US, if that’s how you roll
• Awesome monthly team events + smaller get-togethers (board game nights, trivia, etc)