At Ellevation, we develop world-class software to help school districts and educators support the fastest growing population of K-12 students: English Learners (ELs). By combining great products, student data, and research on best practices, Ellevation helps school districts transform their EL programs and ensure all students can achieve their highest aspirations.

We are a fast-growing, mission-driven technology company, partnering with nearly 700 public school districts all across the country. We are well-capitalized, have a strong and growing team, and are continuously focused on how to build the best organization so that we can achieve our ambitious social and financial objectives.

This is where you come in…

We’re hiring a Tech Lead to join our Engineering team.

We are organized into small, cross-functional teams that are motivated to meet or exceed high-level objectives in service of our customers. We focus on outcomes over output and our teams are empowered to research, prototype, and develop “MVPs” to solicit user feedback and validate hypotheses. We measure and rapidly iterate so that the end result is a high-confidence, high-value product.

Thought diversity is a core principle for Ellevation Engineering. Our engineers feel comfortable and confident to respectfully voice their ideas and opinions, even if we disagree, because this is how we learn and arrive at the best ideas that lead us to optimal results. We value best-practice software engineering principles such as continuous integration, loose coupling, and SOA. As a small technology company, we seek individuals who are willing to be cross-functional, hands-on in multiple areas, and a technical thought leader for the organization.

Some Ellevation Tech Leads are also people managers, but that is neither a prerequisite nor a requirement of the role.

Your Role as Tech Lead

In your first 90 days as a Tech Lead, you will:

• Be closely engaged with the team product manager to define, clarify, and evangelize the “how” and “why” product strategy that is in service of achieving your team’s objectives;
• Lead your diverse, cross-functional team to ship numerous enhancements, new features, and improvements to production several times a week to elicit feedback from customers and measure successes;
• Enable your agile team to regularly show off new work to the rest of the company, to wild applause, at our weekly “Demo Friday” celebration;
• Spend 75% of your time focused on hands-to-keyboard coding across the stack using various technologies. We use tools such as Elasticsearch, C#, .NET Core, SQL, Aurelia, AWS, Couchbase, Docker, OctopusDeploy, and Python.
• Investigate and solve at least one tricky application performance problem;
• Collaborate (in a whiteboard session or via pair or mob programming) with your peers to solve, sequence, and break down several complex engineering challenges;
• Add value to our shared libraries, infrastructure, and patterns though code and design reviews, building in quality from the start;
• Learn at least one new technology from the team, and likewise propose a new pattern, practice or tool at our recurring “Tech Tuesday” sessions;
• Provide technical coaching and mentorship for engineers who are committed to continuous improvement.

A Little Bit About You

• You’re naturally curious, smart, and friendly. Building a collaborative rapport with your team is critically important in soliciting the best feedback and ideas -- even when they might differ from yours.
• You’re adept at building consensus and a safe, inclusive culture where people feel comfortable expressing different ideas and can get behind decisions. You are a considerate teammate who listens first to understand.
• You’re energized by solving customer challenges and business problems. Your work will result in improved outcomes for students and positive impacts in K-12 education.
• You value failures and mistakes as opportunities to learn instead of finger-pointing. You apply your pragmatism and good judgement in explaining tradeoffs and risks to other team members and stakeholders.
• You will help mold bright, emerging engineers into skilled technical peers. You’re open to being both a mentor and a mentee.
• You can use urgency as an asset when it comes time to rally a team and charge them to exceed objectives, but in a way that is considerate of sustainability, health, and work-life balance.