Outschool
Outschool is an online learning platform that empowers kids 3-18 to learn on their own terms with the widest variety of teachers, topics, and classes to suit any interest. We offer interactive, small-group classes via video that are fun and social, can be taken any time, and clubs that connect learners around their favorite topics. With Outschool, learners are free to pursue their interests, connect with others around shared passions, and build confidence through progress. Since 2015, we’ve partnered with vetted, diverse, expert teachers to give kids everywhere greater access to high-quality education.
With Outschool, kids can go beyond the classroom to discover topics they love.
Why join us?
Help kids love learning. We're building a new kind of global school, designed to foster learning through human interaction and relationships. We know we make a difference: users send us their Outschool stories all the time.
We're also focused on removing barriers for historically underserved learners who face systemic challenges to their success. In 2020, we started Outschool.org and began offering financial assistance to families in need. We are currently creating an Educator Endowment Fund to appreciate the teachers who are so central to our mission of inspiring kids to love learning.
We believe that diversity drives learning. To meet our mission, we encourage, support, and celebrate different ideas, perspectives, and backgrounds. As a fully distributed (remote) team, we challenge one another to find the most effective way to empower learners, teachers, and parents. Your name, race, religion, gender, nationality, sexual orientation, and age are not barriers; they are why we want to work with you. We invite talented and creative candidates who value the importance of nurturing a child's boundless curiosity to join us on this journey.
The pandemic has been challenging for families all over the globe. We acted quickly and worked together to provide quality resources to learners, parents, and teachers in the past year. As communities worldwide rethink their approach to education, Outschool will continue to innovate and provide kids with unique opportunities to explore their passions.
We are well funded and positioned to achieve our mission. We are the leaders in the online extracurricular learning space, and recently announced our Series D funding round at a $3B dollar valuation. Our investors are mission aligned and supportive of growing with integrity and honoring our values.
Engineering at Outschool
We are a diverse group of fully remote engineers distributed across the US and Canada. Our philosophy is to start small and then intentionally iterate to test our assumptions and learn quickly (we call this Remixing Our Work, one of our cultural values). We're iteratively building up a complex product for a highly engaged audience, getting a lot done by staying focused on the work that matters.
We have a set of empowered product teams supported by infrastructure and platform teams. Product teams are composed of engineers, product managers, designers, and often user researchers and analytics experts; everything needed to solve problems for their customer segments. Generally, we follow an Agile philosophy and work on a cadence of two week sprints. We believe in code reviews, frequent deployments, practical pairing, clean code, and robust systems.
We work in modern JavaScript (TypeScript), React, GraphQL/Apollo and Node/Express, backed by PostgreSQL. Elasticsearch powers our consumer search, fed with data from Kafka. We’re hosted on AWS, and use Gitlab’s tools for code management and CI/CD!
We believe the future of education is hybrid — online and in person. We are looking for engineers at various experience levels excited about inspiring children to learn by building tools that allow them to access a fundamentally different learning experience.
Read more about our engineering team on our blog, https://engineering.outschool.com/ . You can learn about our hiring process, career progression, engineering challenges, and more!
We’re building a product where learners come first — that means taking responsibility for kids’ data. We’re not afraid of utilizing services where possible (hello, Zoom!), but many third party services are not equipped to handle data from minors. So we roll up our sleeves and build services for search, logging, and more. Iterating quickly and providing an environment for safe learning requires care, attention, and knowledge of our full technical stack.
But it doesn’t stop with kids. We serve parents, teachers, school, and partners, too! Quickly building features for all of these customers — and all of the ways they interact -- requires reusable components, flexible API design, and iterating on our data models.
Search and discovery are key ways that users find classes that fit their needs. Using data to help parents and kids find classes they love is a key challenge facing Outschool. Doing this well requires building out our data pipeline, beefing up our compute environment, and growing our ability to build and evaluate ML models.
We are also expanding our product internationally and on mobile devices. We are building a platform where learning can be limitless. Come help us build the future of education.
Auto-scheduling classes on demand: a teacher can declare availability and parents can request to schedule a class at specific times. If the request matches availability, we create the class and the parent enrolls immediately. We want to give teachers the tools they need to sustainably and flexibly connect with learners who share their passion.
Finer-grained class feedback. Improve on our 5-star class ratings by building a feedback system that gathers learner feedback about each class meeting. Build the UI and data model, set up internal dashboards, surface information for the admin and operations team. Teachers can use this feedback to improve their classes. Parents and learners can find classes that fit their learning style.
Improve search and recommendations by building models and algorithms to better predict the needs of our learners. Develop features using query context, class information, and learner history. Evaluate A/B tests using a suite of relevant metrics. Work with product and design to make recommendations understandable and compelling.
Many learners connect to class on mobile or tablet devices. We want to provide a native experience that they can use to connect to class, find new areas of interest, and eventually interact with a community of other learners. The interfaces must be usable and compelling to the wide age range we serve, and the experience safe and healthy.
Working at Outschool
Our culture is our shared assumptions about how we work with each other and the wider world. We explored our culture as a team and have codified a core set of shared values. We use these values to guide our work and amplify them through our words and actions. We’ll regularly take stock of our culture to guide its evolution as we build shared experience.
We:
Stand for learners We put learners first ahead of societal or institutional expectations. We listen to kids, respect them, and stand up for them. We trust the next generation’s new perspective.
Bring others in We believe communal effort towards shared goals drives the best results. We look for ways to creatively amplify each others’ work. We involve each other, help each other contribute, and share our strengths with others. We believe our community benefits when we bring in people with different backgrounds and perspectives. We develop authentic human connections so we can move further and faster together.
Remix our work We start small and intentionally iterate so we can test our assumptions and learn quickly. We pay attention to the impact of our work and continuously seek opportunities to adapt and improve. We build on success but aren’t afraid of deconstructing and reassembling if needed.
Embrace challenge We speak up, try new things, drive change and sometimes fail. We are lifelong learners who strive to improve our skills, expand our knowledge, and give and receive feedback. We see the challenges in our work as an adventure with opportunities to learn, succeed, and have fun. We both celebrate progress and acknowledge imperfection.
We use these values as part of hiring decisions and performance reviews, and they drive our everyday work. We don’t expect hires to demonstrate all of these values during interview panels, but we will reject candidates whom we believe would struggle to absorb and live by these values over time.
We strive to create an environment where all employees feel that they truly belong, are valued, feel safe, and are given an equal opportunity to advance and succeed in our company. We have an internal DEI Plan that outlines our Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion goals, as well as the steps that we will take to remain accountable to meeting or exceeding these goals. Reach out to learn more.
Outschool is an equal opportunity employer. We view diversity as a moral imperative and competitive advantage. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability status. We plan and structure our interviews to directly assess skills and experience.
We understand that building a community is imperative to our success and strive to bring each other into our lives in many ways. Outschool supports and promotes the creation of employee resources groups (ERGs) as an important space for employees with a shared identity or goal to come together for support and community. Our list of current ERGs includes groups for women, the LGBTQ+ community, parents, and people of color.
As part of our commitment to an inclusive workplace, we are happy to offer prospective engineers the chance to connect with our engineering employees who come from underrepresented backgrounds. It’s a way to get a better sense of our team and what it might be like to work with us.
If you’re interested in connecting with our team, be sure to bring this up during one of our introductory calls!
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Generous Vacation
We have a flexible vacation policy that encourages regular individual vacations without a set limit. Additionally, we offer an extra
Outschool
holiday each calendar month to recharge and not come back to an overflowing inbox.
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Work from Home
We are a fully distributed team across the US and Canada.
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LGBTQ+ friendly
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Social impact driven
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Workshops/Conferences
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Maternal/Paternal Leave
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Flexible Hours
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Health Insurance
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Prioritizes diversity in hiring
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Philanthropic Contributions
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Team Activities
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Dedicated Human Resources team
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Pet Friendly
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