The Role:

The Lead Software Engineer of Interactive Video is part of a team of developers that is focused on delivering a best-in-class interactive video experience for Newsela customers, with an emphasis on onboarding and training within a teacher’s first 30 days on the platform. The team works full stack, maintaining a separation of concerns between our front end and back end systems. You will help define and build Newsela's architecture for interactive video, building upon and scaling the platform that exists, as well as partnering with our Product team to reimagine and deliver on an interactive lesson experience through video for teachers and students. Additionally, you’ll own the critical work of experimenting and improving interactive video through the experimentation feedback cycle. Reporting to the Director of Software Engineering (Platform Insights and Access), you’ll work closely with members of our Engineering, QA, Design, and Product teams to set the strategy and deliver on a portion of our roadmap.

Why You’ll Love This Role:

You’ll have the opportunity to help shape the future of K-12 education by delivering reporting that enables teachers and school administrators to understand and track the learning and performance of their students. You’ll also be a key player in integrating Interactive Video more fully in our platform, and helping us scale to serve more teachers and students. And because we're a technology company focused on improving the way students learn, you’ll be part of an engineering culture that values teaching, learning, and questioning.

Why We’ll Love You:

You have 6+ years of experience in engineering, with at least 2 years experience serving as a team lead. You’re competent in Python and Next.js, with expert experience in one of those languages. You have expert experience with at least one Javascript front end framework (React, Vue.js, etc). You have strong experience with ES6 server-side development. You have experience with serverless in AWS. You have also demonstrated success acting as the technical voice in a full project lifecycle, from discovery through to delivery. You have strong understanding of web app architecture (3-tier, MVC, REST, HTTP, ORM, load balancing, shared-nothing), service architecture (contracts, message queues, distributed systems, transactions, caching), API tooling (Postman, Swagger), data modeling pitfalls (normalization), hashing, and encryption. As an algorithmic thinker, you have the ability to visualize a problem space, system, or data model and its intermediate states to architect thoughtful solutions. Experience in caching and distributed architectures is a plus. In addition to your technical skills, you are able to balance writing code and helping team members do their best work; as a team lead, you have a proven track record of ensuring each contributor’s work aligns to coding standards and quality practices. You always maintain and evolve coding standards and quality practices, and coach your team to keep them up to speed as well.

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.