Overview

Are you a skilled developer looking to use your expertise in a small, collaborative team with a supportive environment?

About the Company and Sites

BrightSprout is a suite of innovative, online tools that help teachers quickly and easily create classroom materials. Our close-knit team of nine helps hundreds of thousands of educators around the globe make activities like worksheets, crosswords, word searches, bingo sets, and flashcards.

About the Position

We’re searching for a Software Development Tech Lead to help us create the next generation of tools for teachers. This full-time (40 hours/week), long-term position, is the most senior member of the development team and is primarily responsible for the technical direction of the company.

You will be responsible for ensuring our system architecture across multiple codebases develops sustainably. In addition to your own development responsibilities (about 50% of the role), you will also achieve this through leading code reviews, coaching other developers, and working with the CEO to ensure our architecture is aligned to support our business needs.

The role also has a significant DevOps component. You will be responsible for maintaining our server setup (Digital Ocean), deployment scripts, and development environments, and for tracing anomalies found by our application monitoring (New Relic) to fixable code issues.

Salary Range

USD$110-120k

Work Culture

Get the autonomy of remote work alongside the benefits of small company culture––all while making significant contributions to a business that helps people. We’ve always been an all-remote company, and are committed to realizing the benefits of remote work.

Aside from our daily standups (3 PM UTC), you can work from anywhere in the world with a flexible schedule.

We enjoy our work because we like helping teachers and get excited to solve difficult challenges with creative code. There are no orders from on high and no one’s looking over your shoulder. Because we’re small, everyone has a voice as we work together to iterate the best solutions for our users. We like this approach and hope you do, too.

What You’ll Do

• Technical Leadership:

  • Ensure new functionality is implemented with an eye to sustainable growth and code quality

  • Provide technical expertise, coaching, and guidance to the development team, particularly in project kickoff and code review
    

• Software Development

  • Build, test, and deploy inventive tools that let teachers create high-quality activities for students

  • Solve the toughest code problems

  • Ensure code is kept healthy: monitor, maintain, debug, update, test, optimize
    

• Dev Ops

  • Maintain our server setup, deployment scripts, and development environments

  • Investigate system issues and address root causes
    

• Communication

  • Ensure projects meet the needs of technical and non-technical stakeholders

  • Communicate progress and track issues in Jira + Confluence

  • Participate in daily stand-ups, weekly 1-on-1’s, and biweekly retrospectives

Our Stack

• Laravel

  • Events

  • Mail

  • Queues

• VueJS

  • Vuex stores

  • Webpack

  • Composition API

  • Tailwind

  • TypeScript

• PHP

• MySQL

• Nginx

• Redis

• Github

  • Github Actions for CI/CD

  • Git Flow

• Docker development environment

• Digital Ocean

• CloudFlare

• New Relic APM

• Cypress tests

• Jira + Confluence + Slack

Qualifications: What You’ll Bring to the Team

The ideal candidate is a seasoned software developer with strong communication skills and leadership qualities.

• High-level expertise with our stack:

  • VueJS (Advanced)

  • Laravel (Advanced)

  • MySQL (Advanced)

  • SASS/SCSS (Advanced)

  • Git (Advanced)

  • Websockets (Basic)

  • Vite (Basic)

  • Webpack (Basic)

• Proven track record of creating solutions that perform well and look great

• Demonstrated, successful DevOps experience

• Excellent communication with technical and non-technical team members

• Previous experience as technical team lead, project lead, or similar

• Experience coaching or mentoring other developers

• Readiness to work in a continuous delivery environment

• Reliable and consistent high-speed internet connection

• High-level English fluency

• Respect for coworkers and customers without regard to gender, race, religion, national origin, sexual orientation, etc.

You’ll be a great fit for the team if you:

• Enjoy a team-oriented and collaborative work space (we make each other's work better)

• Thrive in a small team with open, positive communication

• Feel a deep ownership of your results, and hone your processes to achieve them

• Enjoy a rapid development cycle and highly organized workflow

• Have flexibility and a growth mindset: we’re all continuous learners here––our sprint retrospectives are the best

• Enjoy coaching less-experienced developers and guiding them to solutions that extend existing code structures appropriately

• Believe the best leaders listen and strive to understand everyone’s needs

• Feel a rush when your code ships

• Already have proven remote work experience

Why join us?

There are lots of reasons to join our team. Here are some of them:

• Use your skills to solve interesting problems.

• Be part of an honest, kind work environment with a supportive team

• Engage in work that actually helps people. Teachers are seriously under-served by tech companies and we’re on a mission to change that.

• Work remotely with a flexible (and reasonable) schedule that you control

• We’ve always been an all-remote company: remote workers aren’t second-class citizens

• Small company culture. Work with everyone directly. No weird bureaucracy to navigate.

Our Hiring Process:

We want to respect your time and be transparent about our hiring process. We’ll take a deep dive on your application materials and will ask for examples. Here are the hiring stages and anticipated timeline:

• Submit application - Mid-January
  We’ll deep dive on your resume, application question answers, and any publicly-available work samples.

• Initial call (~15-20 min) - Late January
  We’ll do an initial video call to make sure we’d be a good fit before you invest more time in the process.

• Technical Challenge (1-2 hours) - Early February
  Demonstrate competency in Vue, Laravel, and MySQL.

• Interview (1 hour) - February
  With the CEO

• Meet the Team (3 finalists) - Late February
  Get to know our team and culture. Work alongside us for a half day and ensure it’s a great fit.

• Start Date: March

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