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Seesaw

Seesaw

Seesaw is a platform for student engagement.

Remote, sf

251 - 500 employees

101 - 250 engineers

$25m - $50m funding

Series a

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Seesaw is a learning platform that brings educators, students and families together to deepen student learning. Teachers design and facilitate powerful learning experiences, students create, reflect, collaborate, and make their learning visible, and families actively support and celebrate student learning. Seesaw is used by millions of K-12 students in over half the schools in the U.S. and 15% of all teachers in the U.S. are on Seesaw every day.

Active Roles

Senior Full-Stack Engineer - Backend San Francisco, CA, United States or Remote

Why join us?

We are profitable and our business is growing rapidly; we signed more major new districts in the last year than we did in preceding 5 years combined. Our platform is used in more than 75% of US schools and more than 1/3 of the 100 largest US school districts have purchased Seesaw for Schools.
We crossed multiple big milestones last year: our platform has seen 20x more activity in the last year, our revenue grew by 5x, and we scaled our infrastructure from 10s of millions to 100s of millions of users. And through it all, we've maintained a consistent 4.8-star rating on the App Store.
You will have full autonomy to lead major end to end feature development – and really see the whole picture instead of just a piece.
We deeply value flexible work hours, including remote work, and believe in providing compensation and benefits that are competitive, fair, and evolving with the needs of employees today.
We're looking to significantly grow our distributed engineering team! Our goal as product people and as engineers is to understand all the different ways that people might use Seesaw and come up with the fewest possible number of flexible product primitives and code paths that maximize the overall utility of the platform. This is an incredible opportunity to have a direct and meaningful impact on a growing profitable company and students and teachers daily.

Engineering at Seesaw

Engineering team and processes

We're a small but experienced team of 20+ engineers who have led efforts on Google Calendar, Maps, Facebook Platform, Twitter, Yelp, Pandora, Apple iOS, and Khan Academy.

At Seesaw, you'll take ownership building features from concept to launch, with ample opportunity to develop across our stack and impact millions of students worldwide. We work on flexible, cross-functional teams (a product manager, a designer, and a handful of engineers), with each team owning a product area. This end-to-end ownership and close cross-functional collaboration ensures we consider every component from ideation to execution.

We build and support products for teachers, students, family members, and school administrators across a variety of devices and clients, including on the web and natively on iOS and Android, and we run our backend on Amazon Web Services. We develop in a collaborative and iterative environment and ship weekly. We value practicality over being clever, we are curious, we value solving the problem over patching the issue, we think it’s okay to say “I don’t know”, and we do our best to help each other.

Technical Challenges

One of the most exciting challenges at Seesaw is creating a product at a quickly increasing scale that engages students and empowers them to share their learning teachers and family members. We work closely with our product managers, designers, and user researchers to understand and respond to the unique needs of our diverse audience.

With a diverse user base, we are constantly tackling the challenge of making Seesaw accessible across as many devices as possible. Making Seesaw a delight to use on the web, on mobile devices, and on Chromebooks is critical to our success and our mission. We are seeing rapid growth all over the globe, and delivering a great experience to our users means figuring out how to scale our services reliably worldwide.

We are constantly innovating to introduce more ways for students to express themselves in Seesaw via a suite of rich, creative, multimedia-based tools and a community-driven Activity Library for teachers to create, share, and discover stellar content to use in the classroom.

Projects you might work on

Create a richer and more personalized experience for teachers to discover activities to share with their students.
Build new ways for students to express and engage in what they are learning in the classroom on Seesaw.
Help our growing number of paid schools and districts integrate with and manage Seesaw more effectively.
Work on our backend systems to help continue scaling our service to tens of millions of users worldwide.
Help us actively migrate our Web App from AngularJS to React.

Tech stack

Python

Angular.js

React

AWS

DynamoDB

Elastic Search

Tornado

Redis

CloudFront

Docker

Android

Objective-C

iOS Development

AWS SQS

AWS Lambda

Working at Seesaw

We value humility, curiosity, and transparency as we work together to serve students, teachers, and family members. We put a high emphasis on collaborating and continual learning. For example, we have company-wide lunch & learns for Seesawers to learn about what other teams are working on.

The K-12 market also represents an incredibly diverse user base. We're actively working to build a diverse and inclusive team that can best advocate for the needs of our user community. More than 50% of our prod/eng team identify as women and more than 11.5% identify as members of underrepresented racial and ethnic groups.

https://www.keyvalues.com/seesaw

Diversity and Inclusion

Inclusivity is top of mind for our team members and for our users.

From a product standpoint, we are constantly asking ourselves how to make Seesaw as inclusive as possible. Thinking through a diverse, equitable, and inclusive lens is critical for our business. It’s how we can provide the best service possible to our users. Seesaw needs to be intuitive for students at all grade levels to use, as well as for parents and teachers across various socioeconomic, cultural, and educational backgrounds. We serve an extremely diverse population and build features that facilitate connections between disparate parties that are also easy to use. For example, we added a translator in our messaging app so that parents and teachers can communicate even if they don’t speak the same language.

Internally, Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) plays an important role as well. We make sure our people programs are equitable, and are always looking for ways to refine or improve our processes. As a company, we regularly survey employees with tools like Officevibe and Pluto to help us identify areas we can be improving and keep employees engaged. We’ve invested in DEI training at the manager level and all our new hires go through DEI onboarding. Each quarter, our DEI Committee (which represents various teams and identities) identifies an educational focus to create greater awareness around DEI topics within the company. In 2020, we decided to focus on education. We’ve been giving educational presentations (i.e. about K-12 student demographics in the U.S.) and brought in a panel of SFUSD school teachers to talk about the demographics of their classroom and how they differentiate their teaching for different learners like English as a Second Language (ESL) or students with disabilities.

Overall, everyone is incredibly open and welcoming at Seesaw. Many of us agree that Seesaw is the humblest company we’ve ever worked at, and that we noticed it as early as our interviews. When you walk around our office, you won’t be able to tell who’s on the leadership team and who joined us last week, and you’ll likely find yourself in conversation with multiple people. :blush:

Connect with our team during your hiring process

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!

Perks & benefits

Generous Vacation

Unlimited PTO

Free Food

Employees get a company credit card to spend on lunch every day.

Gym/Fitness

We give our employees a $350 stipend each month to cover anything Health & Wellness related. We also do virtual yoga and stretching every week!

Beautiful Office

Company Retreats

We have two company trips a year, as well as quarterly offsites and team activities. In the past, we've been to Japan, New Orleans, and Lake Tahoe.