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

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 backend and cloud platform technologies and looking to spend the majority of their time working on our backend systems and building the foundations of the long term Avela 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

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. We are also open to candidates willing to relocate to those cities or commute into them frequently. Here's more details: https://avela.org/hubs

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 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 software across the full stack but with an emphasis on building backend systems with complex authorization and data access needs
• Extensive experience in data modeling (bonus points for experience in highly configurable data models)
• Previous experience building and maintaining both serverless and container based cloud services with IaC (CDK, Terraform, SST etc)
• 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.)

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. We are building geographic "hubs" to facilitate collaboration, so prefer candidates who are located in/around Boston, New York, Los Angeles, or San Francisco, or are willing to commute into them for monthly on-sites.

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