The Role:

As the Senior Backend Engineer you will work on big problems in literacy education, from building the infrastructure necessary to handle tens of millions of users to solving novel problems in text complexity and personalization. Reporting to the Director of Systems Development, you will work on an interdisciplinary team spanning Engineering, Design, and Product to ensure Newsela ships daily product, which will be used by +37M students and 2.5M teachers nationwide. As the technical expert, you will be a key voice throughout the entire development process, including initial discovery (where you’ll be expected to empathize with the end-users and play an integral role in outlining the overall solution so that not only is the software performing as intended, but that adoption and usage follows suit). Your team will own a specific product feature, and have the opportunity to exercise long-term thinking to iterate on the product over time. In addition to focusing on code, you will be a key defender of design details as you bring your code to life. 

Why You’ll Love This Role:

As a Senior Backend Engineer, you will co-own the data model at the core of our services. You will get to flex your algorithmic thinking and help set the strategy for our Systems Roadmap, which will ultimately enable us to keep Newsela’s codebase small, nimble, and ready for change. You will work closely across our Product, Design, Data, and Content teams to help shape the future of K-12 education to deliver content at the just-right reading level. 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. You’ll have close mentorship as needed, and regular one-on-one’s, all to ensure you’re growing your technical skills and interests. 

Why We’ll Love You:

You have 4+ years of backend development experience, and competency in our tech stack (Python, REST). You also possess foundational knowledge of CSS, HTML, and Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. You practice lean and flexible software development and have strong knowledge 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.

In addition to your coding skills, you are able to work and communicate with design, engineering, data, and product teams to produce timely, healthy code. You can seamlessly illustrate concepts from a single function all the way to a system architecture, defend the intention of your solutions, and can explain the implications to technical and non-tech experts alike. You bring an informed point of view to your team, and pay as close attention to design as you do to your code. 

About Newsela:

One of the fastest growing tech companies in K-12 education, Newsela was founded on the principle that while every child learns differently, 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.