Staff Software Engineer (Tools)
Over the last 9 years, Ellevation Education has built a thriving business serving the educators who support English Learners at public schools across the US. Today, over 1,000 school districts use our software to manage their EL programs. We are a successful, rapidly growing business with a real mission -- helping English Learners achieve all they possibly can.
Over those 9 years, we’ve scaled up our engineering team, our codebase and the number of students we support. As we’ve done so, we’ve accumulated some painful frictions in our development processes. Thus, we’re creating a new Developer Enablement team whose mission will be to increase the velocity and leverage of the rest of engineering. We are looking for a Staff Software Engineer to lead that team.
We’ll ask you to immerse yourself in our development processes, develop a set of hypotheses on how to improve them, and then directly lead the work of a small number of experienced engineers. To be successful, you will be extremely comfortable weighing tradeoffs, generating options, and assessing risks. You will have experience in cloud-native organizations, and can speak to both their benefits and their challenges. You’ll be comfortable working across different stacks. Much of the backend for Ellevation’s core product is written in C#, with a fair bit of Python as well. We’re running in AWS, on a spread of Windows VMs, Linux VMs, containers, and Serverless. You’ll be someone that engineers across Ellevation are eager to turn to for expertise and technical guidance - an advisor, as well as a hands-to-keyboard engineer.
As a staff engineer, you’ll also be a part of broader discussions that guide the overall evolution of Ellevation’s architecture -- and, in so doing, you’ll help people across the engineering team level up on complex system design and implementation. We look for experienced engineers who are excited to use their technical skills and experience in support of a mission-driven company.
Within 1 month, you will have:
- Built up a clear picture of the key systems engineers work with to develop our products
- Taken part in the in-flight work to increase developer velocity and leverage
- Started to develop a hypothesis for how you want to improve the development lifecycle
- Built trust and rapport with senior technologists at Ellevation
- Committed and shipped product code yourself, to learn the cycle first hand
Within 3 months, you will have:
- Developed and shared a clear plan for your first set of major investments
- Developed, gathered and started steadily sharing metrics around key pain points
- Garnered some early, measurable wins in key problem areas
- Participated in interviewing for a senior engineer to join your team
- Developed an excellent working relationship with the engineers who use your tools
Within 6 months, you will have:
- Generated measurable improvements in developer velocity and leverage
- Built sufficient trust with the senior technologists to influence architecture and roadmap decisions
- Have launched substantial technical investments, which you are personally driving
- Become a trusted resource to the CTO and CPIO Director, to help understand problems and opportunities around the developer experience
About You:
- You have 5+ years of software development experience
- You have worked in a cloud-native development world, and seen both the benefits and the challenges
- You’re comfortable setting priorities for a small team, and communicating about those priorities to others
- You bring experience with, or an eagerness to learn about, supporting C#/.NET development
- You bring experience with, or an eagerness to learn about, supporting Python/Linux development
- You have a strong track record of helping the engineers on your teams learn and grow
- You demonstrate an eagerness to learn from others
About Us:
At Ellevation, we develop world-class software to help school districts and educators support the fastest growing population of K-12 students: English Language Learners (ELLs). Ellevation helps school districts transform their EL programs and ensure all students can achieve their highest aspirations with a best-in-class data and instructional planning platform, resources to build teacher capacity, and student-facing programs to teach academic language.
We are a fast-growing, mission-driven technology company, partnering with over 800 public school districts all across the country. We are well-capitalized, have a strong team, and are continuously focused on how to build the best organization so that we can achieve our ambitious social and financial objectives.
Why Ellevation?
In addition to our great benefit plans and competitive salaries, here are some other perks that make us unique:
+ Great location in Boston - a stone’s throw from the Chauncy Street/Downtown Crossing T stop (We are currently working 100% remotely due to COVID-19)
+ Ability to make a significant impact in the education industry
+ Fun Fridays including virtual happy hours with our remote team
+ Free snacks, beverages, fruit, and we even compost!
+ On-site gym, game room and darts to support all levels of athleticism
+ Opportunity to join an open and collaborative work environment!
Learn more about our team in our Culture Deck.
Here at Ellevation, we champion diversity, inclusion, equity, and belonging. We strive to build a team that reflects the diverse communities we serve. We’re an equal opportunity employer, committed to creating an inclusive workplace that promotes and values a range of ideas and opinions. We embrace all types of differences in the development of our organization. We are proud to have been recognized in prior years as “Best Tech Workplace for Diversity” from the Timmy Awards for investing in trainings around inclusive behaviors, microaggressions, unconscious bias, and fostering a culture of sharing educational resources across the company. We are encouraged by our progress, but there’s more work to be done.