The Role: 

As the Director of Backend Software Engineering you will mentor lead engineers and engineering managers to cultivate an environment where the delivery teams are inspired to do their best work. With your direction, your team will solve important problems regarding the backend infrastructure needed to power a platform that serves the educational needs of millions of students and teachers. You will work in partnership with other Technology and Product Management leadership to ensure our teammates are well supported and unobstructed in pursuit of their goals. You will be a leading voice of your domain and resourceful to stakeholders throughout the organization.  

Why You’ll Love This Role: 

Each student is deserving of the opportunity to learn and advance regardless of unique learning abilities. We work hard to make sure these opportunities exist. This role is foundational in delivering a platform that educators and students rely on each day. The Director of Backend Software Engineering is supported by the VP of Software Engineering and a team of talented specialists that are aligned in purpose. Together, we pursue the mission of Newsela by building great experiences for teachers and students and solving (sometimes difficult, but always) important problems. 

Why We’ll Love You:  

You have 10+ years of professional software development experience, and ideally 3+ years of experience managing or leading a software development team. You have a history of building products that delight, with a preference towards backend development -- particularly web-based APIs (REST, GraphQL). You have also worked with distributed architectures, service-oriented architectures, and/or microservices. You’ve also ideally worked with a web framework, preferable in Node.js and/or Python. You and your team(s) deliver high quality work on-time or ahead of schedule, when possible. As a leader who is empathetic to the needs of engineers/product developers, you foster a culture where engineers can be fully engaged and creatively solve problems to the benefit of teachers, students, and our internal stakeholders.

About Newsela:

One of the fastest growing tech companies in K-12 education, Newsela was founded on the principle that while every child may have unique learning preferences, they all deserve a rich learning experience that ignites a love of learning. We built our platform based on learning science research to deliver the most engaging, authentic content to modernize how teaching happens in the classroom. Along with interactive assessments and tools, we provide teachers with digital content at five reading levels -- from +100 of the best sources -- that is relevant to the diverse backgrounds and interests of their students. Since we started in 2013, we’ve established a presence in 90% of U.S. K-12 schools and over 2.5M teachers and 37M students have registered with Newsela.