Technical Lead
What do we do?
Teachers Pay Teachers (or TpT, as we call it) is a community of millions of educators who come together to share their work, their insights, and their inspiration with one another. We are the first and largest open marketplace where teachers share, sell, and buy original educational resources. Our community brings immediate access to a world of expertise and offers educators more time to focus on students and teaching.
The New York Times called the phenomenon we lead “A Sharing Economy Where Teachers Win”.
Why do we do it?
Our dream is to make the expertise and wisdom of all the teachers in the world available to anyone, anywhere, at any time. We believe that we can help create real good in the world by empowering the educators to teach their best.
Who are we looking for?
We modeled our company culture on the virtues of our community of teachers and we are assembling one of the most talented teams in New York. We think this article in EdSurge about sums it up.
We’re building a team of deeply good people doing great things. We listen first. We love our work. And we are all teachers and learners in whatever we do. We believe that productivity is never an accident. It’s the result of a commitment to excellence, intelligent planning, passionate team work, and focused effort. We want every day to be fun and to matter.
TpT Engineering:
TpT engineering in NYC is a rapidly growing team. As engineers we keep our community in mind every step of the way. We're investing in TpT's infrastructure to make sure it's not only successful, but an absolute joy to work on.
Role:
As a technical lead at TpT, you’ll have the opportunity to ideate, scope, architect, and build new products from the ground up.
You’ll be responsible for discovering and defining problems, framing and monitoring success metrics, implementing solutions, and following up on feedback. You’ll help us decide when to integrate with third parties and when to build our own tools. With over ~2/3 of US teachers using the site, there will be plenty of opportunities to get your hands dirty solving hard problems.
In this role, you will:
- Lead and mentor engineers to deliver a world-class buying and selling experience to educators
- Provide full stack expertise to the engineering team and establish best practices on code quality and performance
- Collaborate with engineers, product managers, and designers to build great tools for educators
- Build confidence in our systems through automated testing, continuous integration, monitoring, and analytics
- Provide architecture-level and code-level feedback for your team
- Shepherd the technical decision-making process for your team
- Make TpT famous for having a great engineering culture by blogging and speaking about your experiences engineering at TpT
Qualities for a successful candidate:
- About 5 years of full stack development experience
- Experience as technical lead on a project
- Strong experience with JavaScript on the client and server-side
- Experience with service oriented architectures and API driven websites
- Strong ability to evaluate technical tradeoffs
- Well formed opinions on quality and maintainability of technical systems
- Interest in working in a fast paced tech and product oriented company
- Taking an iterative approach to improvement – favoring data over hunches (and yet hunches over unambitious options)
- Ability to mentor and inspire others
Extra Points for:
- Experience with technologies we use in our stack like PHP, MySQL, or Elixir
- OSS Contributor
- Knowledge of Ed-Tech