Staff Software Engineer
Over the last 9 years, Ellevation Education has built a thriving business serving the administrators, teachers, and specialists 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.
We’re currently making a major investment in how our flagship product supports the needs of an EL program: sharing information with parents, sending out and then collecting progress reports from teachers, coordinating various key meetings and signoffs that happen throughout the school year.
We’re looking for an experienced engineer and architect to help lead the ongoing evolution of the systems supporting all these use cases.
You’d be stepping into a technical leadership role helping guide multiple teams -- both setting some overall architectural approaches, but also spending considerable time working with teams in the trenches, supporting them as they figure out how best to solve specific problems in their various domains.
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.
You are extremely comfortable weighing tradeoffs, generating options, and assessing risks. You have experience breaking services out of a monolith… and know when to be careful about sprinting towards too many services, too soon. You’ve lived with systems in production, and have a healthy respect for the challenges of operating complex systems.
You’re comfortable working across the stack. Much of the backend for Ellevation’s core product is written in C#, though we’ve started mixing in some Python as well. We’re very happy to hire folks who don’t know C# if they bring a depth of experience in another strongly typed language and plenty of real-world system design experience. For our front-end code, we’re in the process of moving to React.
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.
About You
- You have 5+ years of software development experience
- You are excited to put your technical skills to work to solve hard problems for a business
- You have deep expertise in designing, implementing and operating complex systems
- You have deep expertise in multiple modern languages, including at least one strongly typed language
- (C# experience is not a requirement, though curiosity about learning C# likely is)
- You have a strong track record of helping the engineers on your teams learn and grow
- You demonstrate an eagerness to learn from others
Our Engineering Culture
We are organized into small product teams that focus on key problems to solve in the context of their specific domain. We focus on outcomes over output. Our teams are empowered to research, prototype, and solicit user feedback to validate hypotheses. We engage users early and rapidly iterate so that the end result is a high-confidence, high-value product. We aim to foster an environment where we have the runway to experiment and learn from failure while tackling tricky challenges.
Our teams are cross-functional in that they are made up of members of Product (Product Manager, UX Designer) and members of Engineering (Tech Lead, Engineers). Engineering and Product work hand-in-hand together -- we call ourselves DevPro and in fact rarely meet in isolation.
Thought diversity is a core principle for Ellevation Engineering. We deeply value engineers who can quickly, confidently and respectfully challenge others' ideas -- because this is how we all make the best possible decisions together.
We also value staying connected & aligned as a team and as a company. We do this through a variety of ways -- regular sync-ups to review quarterly OKRs; weekly Demo Fridays where we preview new features to the entire company; and our twice-yearly all-company offsites, where we gather the entire company for 2 days of team building and fun. We also value evolving our culture. Got some new ideas? Bring ’em on and let’s talk about incorporating them.
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.