Software Engineer (Full Stack) - AVELA - PK12 Enrollment Platform (full time)

Company

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 Software Engineer (Full Stack) to help expand our platform and enhance user experience. Reporting directly to the CTO, you'll have an opportunity to influence the vision of the product and culture we are creating together. We're open to mid-level and senior developers with at least 3 years of full-time professional software development experience (no recent grads right now, sorry).

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

• Own large swaths of features across our tech stack diving into everything - frontend, backend, databases, infrastructure - you’re in it all. No one is an expert in everything but there is no part of the tech stack you’re not willing to roll up your sleeves and tackle.
• Work with the team to guide architecture decisions that deftly balance short term needs while clearly defining the path towards our future vision.
• Help build how we build - we’re a small team and our processes are constantly evolving to meet our needs. Culture and developer experience take work and everyone is involved.
• Be a product engineer - we all care deeply about the product experience and collaborate to build our roadmap and brainstorm ideas.
• Dig in with our customers - we’re a small team and 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 a balance of both frontend (React / Vue / Angular) and backend (any framework works but bonus points for GraphQL experience)
• Extensive experience in data modeling (bonus points for experience in highly configurable data models)
• Startup experience a big plus
• Enterprise software / B2B experience a plus
• 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

$125,000 - $195,000 a year

We also offer generous equity and a competitive benefits package.

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.

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