Possible Locations: Chicago, IL - apply here | New York City, NY - apply here | Newark, NJ - apply here

Start Date: March 30, 2020

Braven: 

In America, we’ve promised that hard work and ambition will be met with equality of opportunity. The reality is that we have a quiet crisis on our hands. Despite 1.2 million low-income or first-generation students enrolling in college each year, only one in four will attain a strong first job or enroll in graduate school upon graduating.

In partnership with universities and employers, the Braven Accelerator empowers promising young people on their path to college graduation, meaningful careers, and lives of impact. Alongside educational institutions, Braven provides a scalable model to discover, develop, and connect extraordinary, diverse, and driven young people to high-quality skill building, opportunities, and networks. From the Accelerator will come a generation of leaders as diverse as our future demands.

To date, 69% of Braven’s Fellows have landed a strong job or quality outcome within 6 months of graduation, as compared with the average of 54% for all students nationally.  Braven Fellows outpace their peers in internship attainment, non-cognitive skill growth, and college persistence. Braven currently operates in Newark, NJ, Chicago, IL, and San Jose, CA, and is launching in New York City. We aim to become the nation’s leading accelerator of diverse talent, putting 100,000 emerging leaders on the pathway to college completion and economic mobility. Our work is highly data-driven around the outcomes of college graduation; workforce readiness skills-based proficiency; employment in a high impact role within six months of graduation.

We believe Braven is a solution and we are on a mission to scale it, equalizing access to the American Dream.

The Role:

Braven is seeking a Manager of Software Engineering (Front-end) to join us in building online experiences, tools, and services to help diverse undergraduate students get strong first jobs after graduation. This role reports to the Chief Technology Officer. You will manage a team of software engineers focused on the user experience to have a real impact on students’ lives. We want students using our platform to feel empowered, connected, and engaged. To accomplish this, we aggressively prioritize which projects we work on, aiming to provide the most value in the simplest way possible. We constantly iterate to improve our services as we see what works and what doesn’t. We’re agile and we like to have fun!

You will play a crucial role in our mission: staying knowledgeable about relevant technologies, developing engineers on your team, helping peers grow through code reviews, identifying weak areas of our architecture and prioritizing accordingly, and leading the technical design of new systems. Braven is entering an exciting growth phase in which we need to balance agility to develop new features against discipline to ensure we use software engineering best practices.  We have projects that span the spectrum of software engineering: feature development within existing products, prototypes for new product discovery, data warehousing/ETL systems, and learning devops technologies to help us deploy/test/troubleshoot faster.

To be successful at Braven, on the Tech Team, and in this role, you must demonstrate Braven’s core values, step forward as an engineering leader, be comfortable with ambiguity and constant evolution, and welcome constant feedback and learning. We are a team that likes each other both in and outside of work! Do you have a strong bias to action and enjoy making the complex simple all while driving and owning all aspects of your projects from conception to completion?  Come join us in shaping the next generation of leaders!

What You’ll Do:

• Deliver significant improvements to our React frontend architecture
• Manage and coach the software engineers on your team
• Demonstrate technical leadership by using best practices in industry and modeling the steps, processes, and communication required for a healthy engineering team
• Manage projects of substantial technical and logistical complexity, demonstrating thorough understanding of the user experience and how that should interact with our data models
• Write high quality idiomatic code that colleagues use to further their own development
• Demonstrate a mastery of computer science fundamentals and design patterns (OOP, data structures, MVC, REST, etc)
• Review pull requests promptly (< 2 days) and give thoughtful feedback often going the extra step to refer to outside resources (such as books) or principles (e.g., Law of Demeter)
• Proactively communicate progress, dependencies, and blockers to stakeholders

Experiences, Skills, and Traits:

• 5+ years of software engineering experience
• 1+ years of managing software engineers
• Proven track record of close collaboration with product managers, designers, and quality assurance analysts, providing estimates or product ideas to influence the roadmap
• Proven track record of strong communication to various stakeholders in language they can understand and at the right altitude to accomplish your goals
• Have a mentality where you leave it better than you found it, be unafraid to refactor and improve code you didn’t write
• Intermediate to expert level knowledge of React
• Beginning to intermediate knowledge of Rails and SQL
• You’re autonomous and self-driven
• Empathy is something you demonstrate and value

Total Rewards Philosophy:

Braven is committed to attracting and retaining extraordinary, diverse leaders who believe deeply in our mission and uphold our core values as organizational leaders and stewards within and outside of the organization. Braven provides a “total rewards package” that encompasses comprehensive and competitive benefits, compensation, recognition, and career development. Current benefits include: Braven covers 85% of health care costs, has unlimited vacation time, matches up to 5% of your 401K contribution starting your first full month, a paid sabbatical after 4 years on staff, and competitive base salaries based on the midpoint of the market among not-for-profit organizations of similar size. We believe in compensating staff members fairly in relation to each other, their qualifications, and their impact on behalf of the organization and take internal equity seriously. Staff who are meeting expectations generally receive an annual 3% increase. Braven conducts benchmarking every other year; based on this external data, some salaries may also receive market adjustments to keep pace with relevant competition in similar roles. Braven reserves the right to change benefits at any time.

The salary for this position depends on your prior work experience. Please be advised, you will have an opportunity to discuss salary in more detail after you begin the application process.

Braven is an equal opportunity employer and considers qualified applicants for employment without regard to race, color, creed, religion, national origin, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity and expression, age, disability, veteran status, or any other protected factor.  We encourage talented individuals of all backgrounds to apply.