Technical Lead, Core Services
About Us:
At Teachers Pay Teachers (TpT), we're unlocking the power of educator-created content. TpT gives educators access to a trusted, one-of-a-kind community. We are the world's first marketplace of our kind and founded by a teacher, for teachers as the go-to platform for teacher-created content for nearly 15 years. We are currently serving more than 7.5 million users and more than 85% of U.S. teachers. TpT is focused on building the next generation of e-learning experiences for millions of students and teachers across the world. If you haven't heard of TpT yet and want to learn more, just ask any teacher!
Who we are looking for:
We’re a team of 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 teamwork, and focused effort. We want every day to be fun and to matter.
The Core Services Team:
The Core Services team designs and builds the highly scalable and reliable services and patterns that power TpT’s portfolio of products. The team owns several domains central to TpT’s business, including how our catalog of Resources is made available to other services, our payments and order processing system, and the API orchestration layer used by services built at TpT. In addition to the development of critical services, patterns, and frameworks, the best practices the Core Services team develops will serve as a blueprint and guide that all product engineers at TpT will leverage. You’ll be looking to find common use cases across all of our product surfaces that we can make easier to implement, while also working with new-feature product teams to help them integrate their vision with TpT’s core domains.
The Role:
As a technical lead at TpT, you own the on-time, successful delivery of a team’s work. To accomplish this, you’ll be expected to participate in conversations with the team’s stakeholders including product engineering teams, the finance team, and others. You’ll guide the Core Services team in successfully translating these stakeholder needs into a plan of action that leads to a high-quality product reaching users’ hands and meeting business goals. In the process, you drive the team’s engineering systems and processes to deliver products at high velocity and quality.
Responsibilities:
- Drive delivery of high quality products and features by working with cross-functional stakeholders to define, scope and prioritize upcoming projects
- Provide technical oversight to the breadth of engineering work on the team, participating directly in implementation as required.
- Implement a healthy, inclusive team culture that emphasizes continuous learning, mentorship, and empowerment. As a technical lead you will provide feedback and mentorship to your team members and peers.
- Encourage and exemplify exceptional communication and collaboration on the team. Leverage these practices to help the team resolve ambiguity and make effective decisions.
- Effectively scale yourself by defining and delegating projects where appropriate, while continuing to provide helpful input to teammates.
- Contribute to the maintenance and operation in production of the systems the team supports and builds by participating in our on-call rotation.
- Inform the teams’ roadmap by using a working knowledge of product direction to stay ahead of the curve of feature development.
Qualities for a successful candidate:
- Experience in working across multiple languages and technologies, especially the willingness to dive into new concepts and learn.
- Experience in any of Elixir, Rails, Node.js, Typescript, or PHP, and with technologies and patterns like GraphQL, Serverless, async workflows, or service oriented architecture are not requirements, but certainly positives.
- Experience in building shared patterns and services that can continue to evolve past their initial implementation.
- Experience in building highly scalable backend patterns and services that can support a multitude of use cases.
- Backend focus, but with an empathy for the needs of the teachers who use TpT, so we can provide a strong foundation on top of which to build new and extend existing products.
- Excellent written and verbal communication skills. We work with people all over the world, so we need to be able to communicate not just face-to-face, but also asynchronously.
- Willingness to ask questions that help you and others learn and grow together, challenge assumptions that aren’t validated and clarify the goals of projects, teams and the company.
Benefits & Perks:
At TpT, we believe the positive experience of employees is essential to growth, both individually and collectively. To achieve our mission of ‘Empowering Educators to Teach at Their Best,’ we must also empower the members of our TpT Team to work at their best. To that end, two of our core company values are “We Learn and Grow Together” and “We Enjoy the Journey.” We’ve committed to these values and to our employees through investing in added benefits and perks:
- Comprehensive Medical, Vision & Dental Benefits
- Free Telemedicine Membership - 24/7 access to trusted medical advisors
- Generous PTO and Wellness Days
- 5 Week “Recharge Leave” after 5 Years, to refresh and celebrate the impact you’ve had at TpT
- Generous Parental Leave (for new parents) for time to adjust to parenthood, plus additional six weeks for the birth parent
- Onsite Mother’s Room
- ‘Employee Resource Groups’ (ERGs) to promote employee inclusivity and belonging
- Engineering Learning Fridays (ELF), to provide a space each week for Engineering teams to collaborate and learn from each other
- ‘Professional Development’ Stipend, to support the professional growth of employees (including - but not limited to - subscriptions, books, lectures, etc.)
- Annual Company Events (Camp TpT, Field Day, Hackathons, Holiday Party, Summer Picnic, Classroom Visits, etc.)
Here at TpT we value Diversity & Inclusion and encourage people to bring their most authentic selves to work. We cultivate an environment where people are recognized and celebrated for their individuality.
Any TpT applicant who requires reasonable accommodations during the interview process should contact the TpT People Ops Team ([email protected]) to make the need for an accommodation known.
Finally, if you’re a California resident, California law requires that we provide you notice about the collection and use of your personal information. We encourage you to read it carefully. You can find our full notice here.