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Software Engineer - Full Stack (Data/Platform Heavy, Senior Level)

San Francisco, Boston, New York, or Los Angeles
 
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.”
 

Role

We’re seeking an experienced Full Stack Software Engineer to help expand our platform and enhance user experience. As a startup a core requirement of every role is the ability and willingness to dive in and attack anything across the stack and that is absolutely part of this role. That said, no one is an expert in everything and for this role we’re looking for someone who is most comfortable and experienced with data pipelines and cloud platform technologies and looking to spend the majority of their time helping to build out our data integrations, pipelines and building the foundations of the long term Avela data platform. 
 
Reporting directly to the CTO, you'll have an opportunity to influence the vision of the product and culture we are creating together. Given the impact of this role we’re looking for senior developers with at least 5 years of full-time professional software development experience.
 

Location

We’re a semi-remote company with hubs in San Francisco and Boston. The San Francisco hub includes the CEO and Engineering Lead, so we strongly prefer candidates living in the SF Bay Area to facilitate in-person collaboration and social connection.

Note on Titles

At Avela, we eschew corporate hierarchy and the traditional titles that go with them. All of our software engineers have the same title and we index levels and corresponding compensation to responsibilities and experience.

Responsibilities

  • Work with the team to guide the design, development, and execution of the next generation of the Avela data platform that deftly balances short term needs with concrete phases that build towards our future vision.
  • Be a product engineer - we all care deeply about the product experience and collaborate to build our roadmap and brainstorm ideas.
  • Help build how we build - as an early stage startup our processes are constantly evolving to meet our needs. Culture and developer experience take intentional thought and work and everyone is involved.
  • Dig in with our customers - everyone is part of customer success. If a customer is having issues engineering is always there to solve technical issues.

Qualifications

  • 5+ years of full time experience building data pipelines with a specific emphasis on integrating with external software and systems and APIs
  • Extensive experience in data modeling (bonus points for experience in highly configurable data models)
  • Previous experience building real time data pipelines including strategies for dynamic data mapping and validation
  • Startup or greenfield project experience
  • 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.

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.)

Compensation 

$150,000 - $179,996 a year
We also offer generous equity and a competitive benefits package.
 

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’d like to ensure colleagues have an opportunity to connect with each other regularly, and that teams have a few days to work together onsite each month. So we are only hiring candidates for most roles who live within one of our two hubs:

  • San Francisco Bay Area - Office Downtown SOMA, San Francisco, CA
  • Greater Boston - Office in Kendall Square, Cambridge, MA

Please review the specific job description carefully, as each role might have it’s own unique geographic requirements. For example, some roles might only hire in one hub where the hiring manager is located, and other roles might benefit from geographic distribution and support hiring outside of hubs (e.g. sales).

Outside of our occasional collaboration and social gatherings, we offer a flexible, work-from-home culture. We trust our employees to work from wherever they are most productive and comfortable for most of the time, as long as it is private with high speed internet.  We hope this offers the best of both worlds - the flexibility to work remotely most of the time (far more than a hybrid model), but still the benefits of in-person collaboration and socialization.

Just like we believe in the value of finding the right school for each child, we want to help candidates find the right company. To help you evaluate if Avela is the right fit, we want to be transparent about our evolving company culture and approach to onsite collaboration. You can read more this Community Hub Model and our collaboration norms here. Over time, we expect to spend more time working collaboratively in our hubs.

 

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.
 

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

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