Senior Backend Engineer

Description

What you tell your friends you do

“You know how teachers in public schools are always overworked and overstressed with 30 kids per classroom and never ending state tests? I make their lives possible and help their students make it pretty far in life”

What you really will be doing

• Architect, design and develop new web applications, APIs, services, tools and distributed systems for the Front Row ecosystem in Haskell, PostgreSQL, Ansible and many others. You will be primarily focused on the backend of Front Row's SaaS products
• Mentor and support more junior developers in the organization
• Create, improve and refine workflows and processes for delivering quality software on time and with carefully calculated debt
• Work closely with Front Row educators, product managers, customer support representatives and account executives to help the business move fast and efficiently through relentless automation.

How you will do this

• You’re part of an agile, multidisciplinary team. You bring your own unique skill set to the table and collaborate with others to accomplish your team’s goals.
• You prioritize your work with the team and its product owner, weighing both the business and technical value of each task.
• You experiment, test, try, fail and learn all the time
• You don’t do things just because they were always done that way, you bring your experience and expertise with you and help the team make the best decisions

What have we worked on in the last quarter

• We have rewritten our business logic to be decoupled from the Common Core math standards, supporting US state-specific standards and international math systems
• Released a High School Math MVP product
• Changed assigning Math and English to a work queue metaphor across all products for conceptual product simplicity and consistency
• Implemented a Selenium QA test suite 100% in Haskell
• Released multiple open source libraries for generating automated unit test fixtures, integrating with AWS, parsing and visualizing Postgres logs and much more

• Made numerous performance optimization passes on the system for supporting classrooms with weak Internet bandwidth

Team

We’re an agile and lean small team of engineers, teachers and product people working on solving important problems in education. We hyper-focus on speed, communication and prioritizing what matters to our millions of users.

Requirements

• You’re smart and can find a way to show us.
• A track record of 5+ years of working in, or leading, teams that rapidly ship high quality web-based software that provides great value to users. Having done this at a startup a plus.
• Awesome at a Functional Programming language: Haskell / Scala / Clojure / Erlang etc
• You live and breathe APIs, you have great taste in API design
• You have a strong understanding of distributed systems and networking fundamentals
• Exceptional emotional intelligence and people skills
• Organized and meticulous, but still able to focus on the big picture of the product
• A ton of startup hustle: we're a fast-growing, VC-backed, Silicon Valley tech company that works hard to achieve the greatest impact we can.

Benefits

• Money, sweet
• Medical, dental, vision
• Incredible opportunity to grow, learn and build lifetime bonds with other passionate people who share your values
• Food, catered lunch & dinner 4 days a week + snacks on snacks
• Room for you to do things your way at our downtown San Francisco location right by the Powell Station BART, or you can work remotely from anywhere in the US, if that’s how you roll
• Awesome monthly team events + smaller get-togethers (board game nights, trivia, etc)

Front Row is an equal opportunity employer and value diversity at our company. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability status.