Manager, Software Development

History & Mission 

Founded in 2014 in Montreal, Canada, Paper is an educational support system (ESS) for K-12 schools across North America. The company’s fundamental mission is to bridge the gap between what schools provide and what students need to succeed. As a personalized learning platform that empowers all students and maximizes their lifetime potential, Paper’s team of vetted and trained educators offer 1:1 online tutoring for any subject, at any time. Students communicate with these educators about their challenges with classwork and solve their problems collaboratively via a rich, text-based environment.

Paper closed its first public school deal in 2018 and has subsequently signed numerous districts onto its platform. In 2019, Paper generated $1 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR) and exited 2022 with $68 million ARR. Paper has grown from 174 employees in 2019 to over 1800 employees currently (split between FTEs and Part-time Tutors). 

Today, Paper serves more than 3 million students from over 400+ school districts across 40 US States and Canada with headquarters in both Montreal and Las Vegas. Paper integrates directly into a school district’s existing IT infrastructure and leverages technology to equip all students with personalized learning to maximize outcomes.

Solutions 

The Paper ESS is comprised of three key solutions allowing each student to build a learning profile that is informed by data collected throughout their academic journey and augmented by the data of Paper’s growing network of learners across North America. Since its founding, the company has been optimizing its product and has evolved into a per-student annual subscription license that targets public school districts as the primary customer.

1. Personalized Tutoring: Paper provides students with 24/7 access to tutoring in any subject, anytime from anywhere. Various communication features (including text, voice notes, and a virtual whiteboard) ensure students have an experience that best suits their preferred learning style. Support is available in English, Spanish, French, & Mandarin.

2. Practice Center: Paper provides practice tools that support in-class and at-home academic practice in engaging formats that focus on their zone of proximal development, including Math, English, Language, Arts, and Reading fluency.

3. College and Career Readiness: Paper provides students with resources that prepare them for life after high school, including academic planning, college and career readiness tools, work-based learning, and micro-credentials. Paper helps ensure every student’s education leads to a successful career outcome, whether through a degree or going into the workforce.

Additionally, the company’s platform delivers a portal for teachers and administrators to gain data and analysis of a student’s competencies and progress. 

Financial Sponsors

Since its founding, Paper has raised over $390 million in financing. In 2016, the company received $1.6 million in seed funding, led by Birchmere Ventures, followed by $7.5 million in a Series A round led by Reach Capital and Bullpen Capital, with participation from Google. In 2020, Paper raised an additional $11 million in funding led by Framework Venture Partners and Salesforce. In June of 2021, the company closed a $100 million Series C led by IVP, and the following year in 2022, Paper closed a Series D financing of $270 million led by Softbank and Sapphire Ventures. 

The Opportunity

Paper grew at an incredibly rapid pace over the COVID-19 pandemic when the world experienced a sudden shift away from the classroom and forced rapid adoption of online learning, education, and virtual tutoring. Post-pandemic, with the democratization of Generative AI and the shift in federal funding, Paper is refocusing its efforts towards a path to profitability.

Job Summary

Reporting to the VP Engineering the Software Development Manager will manage software developers across multi-disciplinary teams and supervise engineering deliverables. This hire will oversee the professional development, career growth, and performance evaluation for their direct reports. The Software Development Manager will collaborate with Product Managers and Product Designers to facilitate the translation of business requirements into technical needs and actions. They will also be directly involved in coaching, professional development and career growth of developers of various disciplines on their teams. Our tech stack is a Vue front-end which consumes various REST APIs built on popular Python and PHP frameworks, MySQL, Postgres and Redis Memorystores.

Job Description

Responsibilities

• Accountable for overall delivery of engineering tasks, including tech design and development

• Support, and empower a team of developers working across multi-disciplinary teams

• Collaborate with product managers on estimations, backlog prioritization, and follow-up with the development team to ensure on-time delivery.

• Coordinate with engineering managers and technical leadership to plan, prepare, and execute product and engineering roadmaps

• Contribute to the code base and ensure smooth integration between systems

• Create and set goals and objectives for your teams and direct reports

• Train, coach, grow and evaluate performance for team members

• Leverage various tools to measure, track and analyze performance of teams and direct reports and drive results

• Facilitate team-wide ceremonies and rituals based around collaboration, knowledge sharing and process improvement

• Maintain technical knowledge base and documentation for your teams

• Advocate for, maintain, and grow Paper’s culture and values

• Routinely on-call rotation for incident response management.

• Conduct Agile ceremonies (standup, sprint planning, backlog grooming, retro) 

• Development time estimation

• Development Progress Reporting

• Management of Developers

Requirements

• Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Engineering or Computer Science preferred

• 3+ years experience as a Software Developer or Software Architect

• 1+ years experience in a leadership role, managing distributed teams in fast-paced environments during periods of rapid growth

• Service oriented and event driven architecture knowledge

• Experience with GCP/AWS cloud providers.

• Knowledge of different engineering disciplines and how they interrelate

• Ability to understand code without working on it in a day to day basis

• Ability to analyze and manage risk

• Expert knowledge in modern, agile SDLC and goal setting frameworks like SMART, OKRs, etc

• Strong project management skills

• Working knowledge of JIRA, Git, GitHub

• Experience with EdTech software (learning management systems, student information systems, etc.) and EdTech industry standards (LTI, OneRoster, CASE, etc.) preferred

About Paper

Paper offers an exciting, dynamic, inclusive work environment putting excellence at the center of everything we do. Our mission is woven into the fabric of our culture, challenging our team to build meaningful and creative solutions. 

We thrive when we collaborate with each other, and use integrity and selflessness to align our business decisions with our mission. We approach every challenge with positivity, achieving the outcome we want regardless of what gets in the way. Our tenacity propels our hyper-growth, where trust is key and we all strive to make an impact every day.

We believe that diverse teams build better products. Paper does not and will not discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, gender, gender orientation, gender expression, age, national origin, disability, marital status, sexual orientation, or military status in any of its activities or operations.

Nobody checks every box, but the Paper team is built by passionate and innovative people who share our mission for democratizing education. If you don’t think you meet all of the requirements above but are still interested in the job, please apply.

PS. Equity is our mission! We make sure to treat all candidates equally: If you are interested please apply through our job board - our amazing talent team will reach out! Our team isn't able to pass on any calls/ emails our way - and this makes sure that the candidate experience is smooth and fair to everyone.

Requisition ID

R-100245