gainful.io

Job Description

We believe that diverse minds can help us build the best products for current and future teachers and students. We believe in inclusivity, equity, and overcoming unconscious bias in our industry. We welcome anyone who’s ready to take the next step in their software engineering career, regardless of the path they’ve walked to reach this point. If you love science and education, strive for excellence in software engineering, and identify as a member of an underrepresented group in our community, then please apply for this job - or any of our open positions!

At Stile Education, we create incredible, engaging science lessons and couple them with an intuitive and flexible teaching platform that encourages a dialogue in the classroom. We back it up with a dedicated Support and Teaching team to help teachers use effective pedagogies, regardless of their level of computer savvy.

We’re a small team — 20 engineers — but we’re having a big impact. Stile is used by 1 in 3 Australian high schools and (nearly) 1 in 2 students in our target years (7-10). We're expanding into the America market and the company is scaling up. This an opportunity to have a big influence in a growing team, and make a significant long-term change to education, critical thinking, and science literacy.

We’re looking for a talented full stack engineer to work with us. We work in cross-functional sprint teams, and encourage upskilling in breadth as well as depth. The team will build new features that help teachers teach, handle challenging infrastructure scaling issues as we expand in the US, and above all help each other succeed and learn.

If all this appeals to you, then send us an email.

We have:

• a highly-motivated and talented team with many experienced engineers
• a genuine commitment to the professional development of each engineer through training, coaching, regular feedback and increasing responsibilities
• a near-continuous release cadence, involvement of engineers in the design process, and a willingness to take calculated risks
• a large base of real customers, which is growing rapidly as we expand overseas
• enormous respect for our employees’ work-life balance reflected in our parental leave policy, individual flexibility and sustainable project pace
• a mission that drives our company, and a strong sense of ethics in everything we do
• a modern tech stack. AWS. Terraform. Rust for tooling. CI on Buildkite. An API written in Ruby and Sorbet (not Rails), with a frontend in React and Typescript, glued together with Protobuf interfaces.

You can find out more about our product at https://gainful.io/jobs/9RMDcPJs0LQ/l/1, and more about our company at https://gainful.io/jobs/9RMDcPJs0LQ/l/2.

We’ve already helped half a million secondary school students in Australia learn science. In the next few years, we’re striving to perfect our product within Australia and bring our lessons to the rest of the world.

About you

You're a mid-level or senior engineer.

It doesn't matter if you're missing a few bits and pieces from our tech stack as long as you can show a track record of picking things up quickly.

You know that sometimes "more tech" isn't the answer. You love thinking about people, processes, and systems for continuous improvement, and use a balance of technology and people skills to have a huge impact.

You seek to understand your teammates rather than win today's argument. You win hearts and minds with carefully considered opinions, and know that success comes from having a whole team working together well. You raise up your peers' voices and enjoy nothing more than seeing your teammates succeed.

You have a strong desire to improve things around you rather than just getting the job done. That said, you know that value exists only once it's shipped and are pragmatic about delivering results.

You think about the value of competing projects and priorities, and enjoy finding the balance between things that are urgent now, and things that will set us up for success in the future.

The interview process

First, send us an application following the instructions at the bottom of this page. We'll get back to you within a few days.

We'll then catch up with you for a coffee (or video chat if we're in lockdown) to ask a few questions about what interests you and your past experiences.

Proceeding from there, successful candidates will need to complete a coding challenge, technical interview and past experience interview.

For more information on our hiring process, please refer to our hiring process.

In these interviews, you will need to demonstrate:

• Programming competence, systems design skills and software engineering knowledge commensurate with your experience level.
• Resourcefulness and initiative, leading to high impact at past jobs.
• Ability to ask the right questions, learn quickly, and tackle complex problems.
• Ability to focus on the user experience, while balancing it against cost, security, and scalability considerations.

Experience indicators for applicants (these are advisory only and will vary for each candidate):

Mid-level engineer

• 2+ years of hands-on experience in programming, or part-time equivalent
• Foundational knowledge of computer science and software engineering principles
• Proven success on multiple projects.

Senior engineer or higher

• Many years of experience in the industry.
• Has held technical leadership positions before, or has contributed a lasting impact on their workplace through other means.
• Broadly knowledgeable about the industry as well as technology.
• Deeply knowledgeable on many technical areas.

How to apply

Click apply and be sure to include the following:

• A cover letter addressed to Daniel Rodgers-Pryor telling us why you’re the best candidate for the job and also a paragraph on which of the Behaviours of Effective Stile-ists most resonates with you or which you disagree with and why. Your cover letter should be no more than two pages long.
• Your resume.

Engineering at Stile

Stile is owned and led by engineers. Our team of world-class engineers work closely together to build exciting things on an intuitive and flexible teaching platform. We solve problems quickly while maintaining our relentless commitment to building high-quality tools that last. We’re a small team who have outsized influence. The tools we create genuinely improve science education for thousands of students around the globe.

If you’re keen to have a rewarding, impactful career that will help improve scientific literacy amongst young people globally, we'd love to hear from you.