Software Engineer - Back-End

Remote
Product & Engineering /
Full Time Employee /
Remote
We're promoting equity in education through data-driven school enrollment and admissions -- join us! We're looking for a fully remote, full stack engineer to join our core team. As an early team member, you'll have a major role in shaping our vision, strategy, culture, product, and code. But unlike other companies of our size, you'll be well supported - we have two designers and three PMs.

tl;dr:

1. Seed startup with significant equity
2. Fully remote and flexible (permanently)
3. Mission-driven, edtech, equity-focused
4. Nobel Prize winning tech w/ renowned founders and wicked smart engineers

Product

Avela is promoting equity in education admissions and enrollment. We give enrollment, admission, and award officers the tools to make equitable decisions about the allocation of educational opportunities.

We are building a suite of products for school enrollment and admissions, including:
-- Avela Explore: Yelp for schools, to help parents and students find the right educational programs
-- Avela Apply: Accessible, mobile friendly application suite
-- Avela Match: A centralized market for coordinating offers across schools (e.g. in a district)

Role

You'll have an opportunity to influence the vision of the product and culture we are creating together. Come build something out of nothing with us! We're looking for someone entrepreneurial who is excited to work across the product. We're open to mid-level and senior developers with at least 4 years of full-time professional software development experience (no recent grads right now, sorry).

(This role is for a back-end engineer, but we are also looking for front-end and full-stack developers as well - see those jobs posts.)

Responsibilities

    • Develop groundbreaking software.
    • Design and develop back-end features while balancing scalability with business milestones.
    • Explore product-market opportunities and co-create products with our customers. 
    • Collaborate on the product roadmap and prioritization of our product backlog.
    • Offering technical support for our customers. Until we grow our customer success team, we’ll need help from the entire engineering team to support our customers with technical issues.

Qualifications

    • 4+ years of full time experience building software
    • 3+ years back-end development experience, relational database modeling
    • Testing / CI / CD
    • Machine learning experience a plus
    • Startup experience a plus
    • Enterprise software / B2B experience a plus
    • Passion for education, equity, or social impact
    • Entrepreneurial spirit and drive
    • Growth mindset and desire to constantly improve
    • Legal ability to work in the US, based in the USA.
Company

Avela is a Nobel Prize-winning edtech startup building the first platform for families to navigate their child's educational journey and a universal application for PK-12 education, daycare, and enrichment programs, promoting equity and access to education. We’re like “OpenTable for Education” or “Mindbody for Schools.”

For students and families, this simplifies the process of finding and applying to educational programming. For schools and districts, this streamlines operations and helps increase enrollment (and hence, revenue).

We sell our application and enrollment platform directly to school districts, charter networks, other educational providers, cities, and states. We work with school districts and charter networks across the country, including in Oakland, Seattle, Hartford, Tulsa, New Orleans, Newark, and Jersey City. We also work with a range of nonprofits and NGOs, including Teach for America and the Inter-American Development Bank, as well as the US Military.

Our platform has four parts to cover each stage of the application journey, from exploring options to applying and final selection and admission:
Avela Explore - Mobile-optimized school finder and opportunity navigator
Avela Apply - Streamlined application management system and tracking
Avela Match - Research-based admission and student assignment lottery system.
Avela Enroll - Online registration, transfers, and enrollment platform with document collection.

We also offer a range of consulting services to help districts implement enrollment reforms and advance equity in educational programs.

Learn more at avela.org.

Team 

Avela was founded by a renowned team of visionaries, including Nobel Laureate Joshua Angrist, Clark Medalist Parag Pathak, and social entrepreneur Greg Bybee. We have a passionate team of entrepreneurs, engineers, economists, and data scientists - get to know us at https://avela.org/team


Benefits

We love our team and care about their wellness. We strive to offer the best benefits of our peers, including:
-- Significant equity
-- Flexible work policies
-- Unlimited vacation
-- Home office stipend or WeWork membership
-- 401(k) program
-- Flexible Savings Account (FSA)
-- Dependent Care Saving Plan (DCFSA)
-- Commuter Benefits
-- Life Insurance by Guardian (covered 100%)
-- Platinum Medical Plan by UnitedHealthcare (Employees 100%, Dependents 40%)
-- Platinum Dental Plan by Guardian Health (Employees 100%, Dependents 40%)
-- Platinum Vision Plan by Guardian Health (Employees 100%, Dependents 40%)

Learn more at avela.org/careers.

Location

We are a flexible, fully remote company; however all full time employees must live in the United States and meet the work authorization policies below. Colleagues are expected to work from a quiet location with reliable, high speed internet, during continental US hours, and in accordance with our collaboration norms outlined below. #LI-Remote

Work Authorization

Although we are strongly supportive of immigrants and individuals of all backgrounds, unfortunately, as a small startup, we are not in a position to sponsor visas and are only able to consider candidates who are authorized to work in the United States without employer sponsorship. We apologize for the inconvenience and look forward to working together in the future.

Remote Working and Collaboration Norms

As a remote-first company, we think deeply about aligning on shared values and collaboration norms. We trust our team and empower everyone to find the right balance for their productivity, but also seek to facilitate synchronous collaboration and minimize asynchronous latency.
 
We ask everyone to have access to a quiet environment, free from distractions during working hours with high speed broadband internet. (One of our benefits is that we'll cover a WeWork membership!) Our default is video-on for meetings to foster relationships and allow non-verbal communication cues to come through, however we understand that from time-to-time it’s helpful to turn video off. We also ask colleagues to have a proper office setup with desk, external monitor, quality webcam, etc. (Another benefit is that we cover up to $2,000 of office setup.)

For full time roles, we expect colleagues to work a normal business day in a continental US timezone of their choice, so long as there's overlap from 12pm - 6pm ET. This ensures sufficient time for synchronous collaboration, but also facilitates flexibility in your schedule. (We are open to other working arrangements, but this must be approved in advance before joining.) We also expect full time employees to join for biannual week-long team offsites (we cover the costs, of course).

We Encourage You To Apply

Avela is a safe, inclusive workplace for people of all backgrounds and walks of life. We strongly encourage you to apply if you are from a marginalized or underrepresented group, even if you don't meet all of the job requirements. If you believe this is a role that you’ll be excited to work in every day, want to be a part of a culture like ours, and will be relentless about pushing boundaries to succeed, please apply.

Tech Stack (for Product/Engineering Roles):
Experience with our specific technologies is not required, even for engineering roles, and our stack is constantly evolving. Here's what we're using now:

Front-end:
-- React + TypeScript
-- Chakra UI with focus on a11y
-- Jest + React Testing Library for unit tests
-- Playwright for end-to-end tests
Back-end + Database:
-- GraphQL with Hasura
-- AWS Lambda with NodeJS / TypeScript and Go.
-- AWS Serverless Services: Fargate, Aurora, S3, SNS
-- AWS RDS with PostgreSQL
DevOps:
-- AWS CDK for Infrastructure as Code
-- AWS CodeBuild and AWS Codepipeline
-- AWS Amplify for Front-End