Senior Software Engineer, Recommendations

The Role:

You will be part of a new organization called “Content Discovery” that focuses on helping the teachers and students to find the right content at the right time and at the right level. You will be working on our Recommendations teams that focusses on helping teachers and students with recommending personalized content thats tailored to their needs. As part of your job, you will work with data scientists, product managers, other engineers on our frontend and backend teams to delight our users with amazing feature launches. You will use cutting edge techniques to improve our personalization efforts, which is a new endeavor to delight our teachers and students in finding content thats tailored to their specific needs.

Why You’ll Love This Role:

You’ll be joining a newly formed team and collaborating with Senior and Principal engineers and other stakeholders to help shape the future of K-12 education. Using cutting edge techniques to build our recommendation engine, your work will directly impact our platform’s ability to serve the content teachers and students are looking for, and enable discovery of engaging, relevant content that further enriches the learning experience in K-12 classrooms nationwide. 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.

Why We’ll Love You:

You have multiple years of experience in building, working and improving ML algorithms. You are enthusiastic and you revel in dealing with ambiguity. You have a high bias for action and you actively look for areas to improve, whether it be in improving personalization across the product  or in reducing latency or in improving code quality. You understand the tradeoffs between over-engineering vs thinking too small and are comfortable in making the case for when to do what. You are comfortable working with cross functional teams and can advocate for the customer. 

You know how to find a shared language between product managers, data scientists, and software developers. You balance your engineering expertise with a product mindset, always digging for the underlying user and system needs, rather than simply settling for surface-level “requirements.” Your passion for complex technical problems is matched by your excitement to lead a team through large, multi-faceted technical projects. You can seamlessly distinguish and delegate responsibilities, set success criteria for projects, and coach teammates with a high level of organizational awareness to ensure each team member is growing and developing professionally.

About Newsela:

One of the fastest growing tech companies in K-12 education, Newsela was founded on the principle that while every child may have unique learning preferences, 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.