Who we are
At Informed K12, we’re on a mission to help school district administrators operate efficiently and gain insight into their most critical school business processes. Still today, most school districts have hundreds of mission critical processes that run on paper, making visibility and improvement near impossible. We transform paperwork from a daily stumbling block to a strategic tool. This makes it possible to hire the right teachers for the right classrooms faster, manage bus routes for students without permanent housing, ensure teachers get reimbursed and paid on time, and a lot more. In short, we are powering the future of school district operations by helping district administrators drive the systemic change needed to improve productivity, accountability and equity.
Our founders came out of Stanford University’s Graduate School of Education. Informed K12 (formerly Chalk Schools) was one of the first companies funded by Stanford’s StartX accelerator and top education technology incubator Imagine K12, now part of Y Combinator. Learn more about us at
www.informedk12.com.
About the role
We are looking for an experienced engineering manager to help us change how districts across the country operate and run every single day. You should have a passion for leading teams, for building an inclusive and collaborative engineering culture and for developing products for communities traditionally underserved by technology. If you believe 10x engineers are born out of 10x environments and want to have a huge impact with the work you do everyday, we could be a great fit!
What it's like to work here:
We work in small, nimble teams of 2-3 engineers. Projects that each team takes on range from real-time search and export tools, database and server optimization, or building our front end system. Teams rotate regularly so you’ll be working with different people every few sprints.
We’re proud of our ability to be full stack. We all have preferences for different parts of the stack, but we all share responsibility for and are empowered to improve our entire platform. This commitment also encourages us to grow in areas we’re less familiar with.
We take code quality seriously and are constantly improving our codebase. Every project we work on has dedicated time to address tech debt and we prioritize code quality initiatives on our product road map. Oh, and we never ship code without writing a full suite of tests (don’t worry, we’ll help in case this is newer to you)!
We work with a solid set of technologies, but are always learning new ones. Our current stack is a mix of Ruby (Rails, RSpec, Capybara) and Javascript (React, Redux, Jest, Enzyme) hosted on Heroku / AWS. We also spend every other Friday as a “hack day” to play around with new technologies,
contribute to open source, or build tools to improve our workflow.
We strive for light and flexible processes. Each team decides how they’ll get work done, but we try to ensure that working solo, together, or even remotely are all equally effective. Daily standups, sprintly retrospectives, paired programming, randomly assigned
code reviews, and “mob reviews” of larger changes are some of the practices we use.
We believe that making great products requires collaboration and empathy. Not only do we work closely with our product and design teams, we make it a point to pay regular visits to our customers. To better understand the challenges our customers are facing, every few months we’ll spend a week directly supporting our client success team.
We are focused on creating a great work environment. Most of all, we work hard to make an environment where honest feedback, mutual respect, and personal growth are valued. We want to make sure everyone feels comfortable bringing their whole self to work.
We need someone who will:
- Build a culture of engineering excellence via giving your team autonomy and setting clear goals and expectations. You empower your team members to make decisions and ask questions that will help them do their jobs better.
- Grow, inspire, and manage an engineering team capable of prioritizing and implementing the highest-impact projects that align with business objectives. Be proactive in identifying and clearing roadblocks for the team.
- Provide hands-on technical leadership in day-to-day software implementation cycles, write specifications, make architectural and design trade-off decisions, participate in design reviews, dive into coding and troubleshooting as required to fill the gaps in the group bandwidth.
- Nurture the technical and leadership growth of other engineers. Improve code quality and make others better through code reviews, pairing, documentation, technical guidance, and mentoring.
- Become a trusted advisor, contributor, and mentor to your team; your team members look to you for guidance and professional development and seek out interactions with you.
What you'll bring:
- Intense curiosity and problem-solving nature — it brings you joy to chew through difficult technical problems and develop simple, clean code and architecture for complex needs.
- Track record of building usable, scalable products (we'd love to see your portfolio or links to any projects you can share!)
- Extensive web development management experience. Ideal if you have knowledge of Rails, JavaScript, and jQuery. Experience managing products through development life cycle.
- Experience managing engineers and projects across the full stack: Frontend, Backend, DevOps, QA, as well as with distributed web-based systems and service-oriented architecture.
- Collaborative development style: you enjoy pair programming and learning with and from others. The success of the team and the company is prioritized above your own self-interest.
- Experience with architecting and scaling SaaS enterprise applications is a strong bonus.
How to apply
- Fill out the application below
- Please attach a resume and cover letter. In your cover letter, let us know why you're passionate about edtech.
We are an Equal Opportunity employer committed to a diverse and inclusive workforce. In fact, one of our four
company values is “Work hard for inclusion.” We believe that our team must reflect the diversity of our customers and that a diverse team where everyone feels comfortable being themselves will be a long-term advantage. We implement policies like the
Rooney rule in hiring and work with organizations such as
Code2040. We actively seek out diversity and do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, gender identity, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability.
Pursuant to the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, we will consider for employment qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records.