About You

The following are just examples of the type of person we think would thrive in this role. You certainly do not need to see yourself in all of these examples to be a great fit for this job.



You care about the human impact of your code

• The features you build and the code you write will impact hundreds of thousands of students. Hopefully that excites you!

• You think that technical challenges are more fun when they also solve human challenges.



You like to build

• You think it is engaging to build new things. Sure, your role will require some rewrites and optimization, but the bulk of what you will do is building new features that amaze our customers, and you like that.

• You are comfortable working in the full stack but know when to call in support if your expertise is lacking.



You like to allow the end users' voices to inform your work

• You believe that in order to solve problems, you need to hear from the user. This doesn't mean you are on the phone daily with customers, but you welcome chances to connect with them.

• You enjoy working with other our employees to brainstorm product solutions to problems they are hearing from our customers.



You believe deeply in equity of access to postsecondary pathways

• You believe in equity, not equality. We work with many students from disadvantaged communities and you believe they deserve more than their wealthier peers, not the same.

• You believe putting students first in our design leads to the most impactful results.



You embrace ambiguity while handling uncertainty

• You are comfortable working with loose guidelines and are able to curate your own path towards outcomes.

• You know that systems change is hard and complex...and you love it.



Qualifications

• Very proficient with Ruby on Rails, PostgreSQL, Javascript, Git, Heroku

• Ability to work anywhere in the stack, delivering quality code both on the frontend and backend

• Experience building, scaling, and maintaining production web applications

• Experience with unit and integration test frameworks such as RSpec or Capybara

• Proficiency using HTML/CSS/Javascript/AJAX

• Passion for creating great user experiences

• Comfortable in fast-paced environments with quick iterations and frequent deployments

• Strong ability to read and understand code you didn’t write

• Strong communication skills, ability to express technical concepts in verbal and written form

• Ability to own what you are building and see it through from end to end with minimal guidance