CTO / VP of Engineering
San Francisco, CA / Boston, MA / Los Angeles, CA / New York, NY / Remote
Product & Engineering /
Full Time Employee /
Remote
Avela is a Nobel Prize winning platform for families to navigate their child’s educational journey. Parents can find, apply, register, and pay for school and programs for their children, all from a common application system with saved profiles. Avela also powers backend admissions and operational workflows, making it easy for schools, districts, and educational providers to equitably serve students. We’re like “OpenTable for Education” or “Mindbody for Schools.”
We’re seeking an experienced VP of Engineering to manage the engineering team, serve on the executive leadership team, and partner with the CEO and Product Lead to drive our product strategy and execution.
Reporting directly to the CEO, you'll oversee a team of 12 employees from day one, with substantial growth anticipated. You'll collaborate closely with our Product Lead to oversee all aspects of product engineering, including quality, architecture, and software development, enabling our expansion from serving dozens to hundreds of school districts across the country. This will require a seasoned leader with the experience and judgment to make critical trade-offs between scalability, urgency, reliability, and quality, ensuring we chart the optimal course for success.
Note on Titles: At Avela, we eschew corporate hierarchy and the traditional titles that go with them. We do not have any Chief XYZ Officers, VPs, Directors, Group Managers, etc. The formal title of the role will be Engineering Lead, but it is the equivalent of a startup CTO or VP Engineering and will be treated as such.
Location
Although Avela is a fully remote company, we are slowing building geographic "hubs" to facilitate collaboration. We strongly prefer candidates who are located in or around Boston, New York, or San Francisco. Our Product Lead is located in Boston, so that would be the optimal location. We are also open to candidates willing to relocate to those cities or commute into them frequently.
Role
- Head of Engineering team, reporting directly to the CEO and managing 12+ employees across engineering, QA, and technical services teams.
- Lead the team, including management and mentorship, instilling a culture of collaborative problem solving, passionate mission orientation, and productive intensity.
- Grow the team as finances allow, including sourcing, interviewing, hiring, and training talent. We expect the team to double within the next 1-2 years.
- Responsible for architecture, software development, quality, and scalability, including product KPIs like uptime, performance, usability, and NPS, and quarterly engineering OKRs.
- Lead the integration of our product suite into a unified platform, with client-based feature flagging and intuitive self-service administration.
- Ensure products can continue to scale to 100x our current user base, supporting over 10 million families across the country.
- Member of the Senior Leadership Team and partner in driving strategy, culture, and growth. Prepare for and contribute to weekly SLT meetings, weekly All Hands meetings, and quarterly board meetings.
- Maintain client trust with industry leading security and compliance, including maintaining SOC 2 Type II compliance and earning ISO 27001 and HIPAA certifications.
- Partner with product and customer success teams to delight our clients and users, maintaining a high NPS and CSAT.
Product
- Our primary product is an application and enrollment management system that we sell directly to schools and districts. The system is made up of Avela Apply (application, offers, waitlists), Avela Match (charter lottery, student assignment), and Avela Enroll (registration and advanced form workflows). We also have a stand-alone school finder (Avela Explore), which was one of our first products and is currently being updated to share a backend with the other three products.
- This is a B2B enterprise product, with complex user roles, data permissioning, security/compliance requirements, and more.
- We place an emphasis on equity and accessibility in our product and build all end-user facing tools mobile-first, localized, and WCAG 2.1 AA compliant.
- We support both admin users at our educational providers (including schools and districts) and end users (parents, guardians, and caregivers), as well as a range of intermediary roles (e.g. school counselors, registrars, etc). (Students do not use our platform directly.)
- Tech stack includes React + TypeScript, Chakra UI, Hasura & GraphQL, AWS Lambda, AWS Serverless Services (Fargate, Aurora, S3, SNS, etc), AWS RDS w/ PostgreSQL, AWS CDK, AWS CodeBuild, AWS Amplify, etc. (Experience with AWS is required, but otherwise no experience with current tech stack required; in fact, we expect to make changes over time.)
Role Qualifications
- 5+ years as a CTO or VP Engineering at a successful enterprise SAAS company. Strong preference for at least 2 different experiences as the senior most engineering leader in different companies.
- 10+ years of experience architecting, designing, developing, and integrating complex systems.
- Experience with B2B enterprise software required; strong preference for experience with highly regulated sectors like education, healthcare, and government.
- At least some startup experience is required - we want to see that you have worked under intense pressure in a highly ambiguous environment with limited resources.
- Experience at best-in-class (large) software companies is a plus, but not required. We think it’s helpful to have worked in a range of corporate environments and seen what $1+ billion companies do right, so that you can help us get there.
- Passion for education or equity is required, and some experience working in education is preferred. We want to see a deep sense of empathy for users, reflecting a genuine understanding of the challenges and needs of our education clients and stakeholders.
- Excellent communicator, able to lead a team, explain technical concepts to non-technical audiences, present to the board of directors, and debate with the leadership team.
- Strategic thinker with a track record of driving technological innovation and business growth. You’ve driven the complex and challenging tradeoffs between speed, cost, and functionality when building a platform while supporting product development in one or more fast-moving companies.
- A flexible mindset, ready to pivot directions swiftly based on product or market dynamics. Able to context shift quickly, wear many hats at once, and thrive through ambiguity.
- Legal ability to work in the US without Visa sponsorship with at least 10+ years of full time work experience within the US.
$150,000 - $250,000 a year
This is a senior leadership position and will be among the highest compensated individuals in the company.
OTE -
Base: $150,000 - $250,000 / year
Equity: 100,000 - 400,000 shares
Benefits: $30,000 - $60,000 / year
We have a strong preference for individuals willing and able to take a large portion of compensation in the form of stock options, to align incentives with the rest of the leadership team, board of directors, and investors. We will work with you to determine the right combination of cash compensation (salary) and stock options (equity), with candidates willing to take lower salary receiving significantly higher equity.
We also offer a competitive benefits package, which is outlined below.
