Remote (able to meet 8am-12pmPT; our team spans UTC-8 to UTC+2) This position focuses on software engineering for the Forum Learning Environment: https://www.minervaproject.com... Learn more about our key values: https://www.keyvalues.com/mine...

REDEFINING EDUCATION

To change the world, we need to improve education everywhere. Minerva helps universities, high schools, and companies around the world who want to use the science of learning to provide the best possible education to their students and teams. We do this by building educational software, individual courses, and entire degree programs. It's all delivered through the Forum Learning Environment with a live video classroom at its core that is purpose-built to implement Fully Active Learning: a research-backed style of teaching and learning that is proven to provide increased engagement, deeper understanding, and stronger retention. Read more about our approach. We also re-imagined and built a university from scratch. Minerva University is a WASC-accredited nonprofit four-year undergraduate institution where students meet and learn with their peers and faculty on Forum as they travel through seven global residential cities. Read more about Minerva University's academics and student experience. You'll be part of the Curriculum & Assessment pod within our 20-person Product Team of engineers, designers, and product managers. You'll work closely with academics, customer support, marketing, and sales to understand our customers' needs and opportunities. Your team's technical challenges include building sophisticated learning analytics tools to synthesize and deliver feedback on written and video assignments from professors to students across a rich domain of skills and learning outcomes in a way that is accurate, intuitive, and actionable. Your team also builds and runs the Course Builder platform, an IDE for classes, courses, and programs that our instructional design faculty use every day to carefully design and program the in-class experiences delivered to Minerva University students and learners at our partner institutions worldwide.

Your typical week will include coding and code review, user investigations, and supporting AV services within the classroom product. We're big on collaboration, knowledge-sharing, cross-training, and retrospectives. If something's not working for us, we fix it. You will participate in mentoring, feedback, and deliberate career development.

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See more details about Minerva's Forum Learning Environment.

RESPONSIBILITIES

• Support a combination of self-hosted and third party AV solutions and integrate them with our classroom product to promote optimal user experiences from anywhere in the world.
• Scale our approach with the number of students and the natural ebb and flow of high and low traffic periods.
• Establish monitoring and analytics that enable us to assess key performance indicators and provide proactive support to students and teachers. These analytics will include key performance indicators such as RTT, packet loss, bitrate, etc.
• Investigate user issues that impact AV experience, including network and computer hardware limitations.
• Use data-driven development and decision making to improve the performance, robustness, and scalability of our systems
• Maintain and expand automated test coverage and QA processes to catch bugs early.
• Teach and learn from your teammates.Use collaborative activities like pair programming and code review as avenues for teaching and learning. Be receptive to feedback from your teammates and generous with your own. Participate in internal tech talks and engineering book clubs.
• Support a culture of code quality, documentation, and thoughtful design tradeoffs. Navigate between shipping sooner and long-term maintainability.
• Participate in customer support to build empathy with students, and faculty and learn how to best improve your software.

TECHNOLOGIES, TOOLS, AND PROCESSES

Rather than focusing on your past experience with specific technologies, we value your ability to learn quickly, make thoughtful tradeoffs, and build maintainable systems. We don't expect you to be immediately familiar with our stack, but rather that you can learn through experience. That said, here are some of the tools that we use:

• React, webpack, Babel, Marionette, and Backbone for building front-end JavaScript interfaces.
• Python, Django, and Django REST Framework for building applications and APIs.
• Celery for asynchronous jobs and workflows.
• MySQL and Redis for data storage and caching.
• GitHub, CircleCI, AWS, and Datadog for building, reviewing, testing, shipping, and operating our systems.
• Slack for communicating, for integrating code review, deployment, and infrastructure notifications into a social space, and for sharing important GIFs

We value empathy, candor, substantive feedback, fast iteration loops, and openness to experimentation over a specific software development process.

You can read more about our team values and culture on our Key Values profile.

Here are some tools we use to plan, calibrate, and organize:

• Use the unit of an “episode” to align planning and goal-setting across teams. Each episode is about four months long.
• Plan high-level development themes at the beginning of each episode.
• Run mini design sprints to design, prototype, and test ideas.
• Gather at a weekly team meeting to reflect on the past week and discuss priorities and collaboration for the coming week.
• Check in through a daily asynchronous standup in Slack to foster accountability, remove blockers, and keep others updated.
• Conduct cross-functional blameless retrospectives twice per episode.
• Organize structured peer feedback sessions once per episode.
• Support each other giving internal brown-bag technical talks.

BENEFITS

• Mission-oriented team and organization
• The spirit of a non-profit university, the focus of a startup
• Sustainable working pace
• Unlimited vacation policy
• Health, dental, vision, commuter checks, and 401K
• Paid parental leave: 12 weeks for birth parents and 6 weeks for non-birth parents
• Competitive salary and stock compensation
• Professional development budget with 1:1 matching

EQUAL EMPLOYMENT OPPORTUNITY

To build a university for 21st century leaders and creators, our team should be representative of our diverse student body. Minerva values a diverse workplace and strongly encourages women, people of color, LGBTQIA individuals, people with disabilities, members of ethnic minorities, foreign-born residents, and veterans to apply. Minerva is an equal opportunity employer. Applicants will not be discriminated against because of any characteristic irrelevant to creating great software, including: race, color, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, age, religion, national origin, disability, ancestry, marital status, veteran status, medical condition or any protected category prohibited by local, state or federal laws.

HOW TO APPLY

Interested? We make applying quick and easy. Just send the following:

• A copy of your resume or a link to something resume-like (e.g., your website, LinkedIn)
• Other links you'd like us to see (e.g., blog, GitHub, a project of yours)
• A brief description of why you are excited for this opportunity to join Minerva. This description replaces the traditional cover letter.