Senior Full-Stack Engineer - Backend

Our Growth Mindset (The Mission): Think back on your time in school and a project or experience that got you fired up, curious, and motivated to try your best. Can you remember one? If you’re like us, there are some projects we remember decades later -- those times when we were so engaged in what we were doing that we couldn’t help but learn.

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.

The Curriculum (Your Role): We’re looking for a Senior Full-Stack Engineer - Backend to help build the platform and deliver product experiences that delight students, teachers, and families. All of our product teams are truly responsible for end-to-end feature development which means depending on the product team you work on and your background you may work on everything from data modeling, architecting a new system or API, or working on user facing product UI. We're currently looking for folks with substantial backend experience in particular.

Your Classmates (The Team): You’ll primarily be working with teammates on one of our product teams, each of which owns a portion of the Seesaw product and audience. Currently we have teams organized around (1) our core learning loop used by teachers, families, and students, (2) our paid product for schools, (3) our messaging service, and (4) our platform team that builds the systems and patterns that support our other teams. But, we're a small team and you'll work closely with all other engineers, PMs, and Designers on our broader product and engineering team.

Subject Matter (Your Responsibilities):

• Work closely with the product, design and engineering teams. Lead an iterative development process to deliver new features that students, teachers, families, and school administrators love.
• Full stack software development for our web app (AngularJS / React) and backend (Python / DynamoDB / ElasticSearch).
• Help develop a strong technical roadmap and engineering culture through design proposals, industry engagement, and more.

Prerequisites (The Requirements):

• 6+ years of experience leading major feature development across a frontend and backend stack.
• Strong Computer Science fundamentals - a CS degree or equivalent experience.
• Direct experience designing, developing, and maintaining software at scale. The best candidates will have shipped web applications to millions of users, and will be able to talk about the backend architecture that supports that scale.
• Strong command of modern web technologies, including at least one SPA framework. (React, Angular, Vue, etc.). Experience developing and using REST APIs or GraphQL.
• Comfort working within complex systems and ability to write readable, maintainable self-documenting or well-documented code to solve complex problems with simple, elegant solutions

Extracurriculars (Nice to Haves):

• Strong ability to architect and build performant, robust, thoughtful features within complex systems
• Familiarity with AWS, especially DynamoDB, ElasticSearch, S3, SQS, and Lambdas
• Strong product sense with a focus on user experience

A little about us:

• We are well funded and have an experienced team. Work with the creators & leads of Google Calendar, Picasa, Maps, Facebook Platform, and Twitter.
• We care about building a diverse and inclusive team to better advocate for the needs of our incredibly diverse K-12 users.
• We prioritize work-life balance and actually walk the walk -- we care a lot about our work, but care more about our friends and family. We encourage everyone to work at a sustainable pace and have an unlimited vacation policy that people actually use.
• We offer competitive compensation and comprehensive benefits including full medical, dental, and vision coverage, 401(k) with company match, paid parental leave, flexible vacation policy, free lunch, wellness stipend, and charitable donation match.

Seesaw provides equal employment opportunities (EEO) to all employees and applicants for employment without regard to race, religious creed, color, sex, sex stereotype, gender, gender identity/gender expression/transgender, national origin, ancestry, physical or mental disability, medical condition, genetic information/characteristics, marital status/registered domestic partner status, age, sexual orientation, or military or veteran status. In addition to federal law requirements, Seesaw complies with applicable state and local laws governing nondiscrimination in employment in every location in which the company has facilities. This policy applies to all terms and conditions of employment, including recruiting, hiring, placement, promotion, termination, layoff, recall, transfer, leaves of absence, compensation and training.