Senior Software Engineer, Technical Lead

A pioneer in K-12 education since 2000, Amplify is leading the way in next-generation curriculum and assessment. Our captivating core and supplemental programs in ELA, math, and science engage all students in rigorous learning and inspire them to think deeply, creatively, and for themselves. Our formative assessment products turn data into practical instructional support to help students at every skill level build a strong foundation in early reading and math. Our programs provide teachers with powerful tools that help them understand and respond to the needs of all their students. Today, Amplify serves over eleven million students in all 50 states.
Amplify is a leader in creating immersive, rigorous digital learning experiences that look great, play great, and help students expect great things of themselves. Amplify has been described as the best tech company in education, and the best education company in tech.
As an engineer at Amplify, you will join a talented team tackling the toughest problems in education with the best ideas in technology - including user experience, front end development, APIs and services, data analysis, and deployment pipelines. You'll play an active role in imagining and improving product design and the classroom and solo learner experience.
Amplify's COVID-19 vaccination policy requires all staff to provide proof of vaccination for in-person meetings unless an approved exemption is provided.
What You'll Do

• Impress the toughest customers around - K-8 graders - by:
  
  • designing and building engaging, quirky, fast frontends using frameworks like React

• Make life better for passionate teachers by:
  
  • architecting apps that meet the ultimate reliability and uptime challenge for digital tools - is this better than paper?
  • building well structured and documented RESTful APIs so that our apps can share data with ease
  • designing tools, workflows, and culture to ship code from your laptop to classrooms frequently and confidently

• Help school administrators build great schools by:
  
  • building data pipelines that respect privacy and ensure security while offering useful insights
  • implementing code that runs great across platforms under variable memory and network constraints
  • analyzing performance and squashing tricky bugs using tools like DataDog, and AWS CloudWatch

• Learn every day by:
  
  • leading collaboration, pull request-ing, and mentoring on a cross-functional team
  • participating in cross-team share-outs, brownbags, and workshop series

• Lead every day by:
  
  • Scanning backlog and metrics for emergent issues
  • Guiding a technical team in an agile environment. Ensuring they have the contextual and technical knowledge to execute against goals
  • Working with designers and product owners to ensure the right thing is well built in a timely manner.
  • Delivering updates and information to managers and partners
  • Being proactive and self-reliant in all things

Example Projects You Might Work On

• Crafting immersive animated environments and characters using the latest web and canvas frameworks
• Architecting algorithms to select the right activity for the right student at the right moment.
• Modeling data from student activities to show teachers just the right advice
• Simulating hundreds of thousands of kids to implement scaling, stability, and security improvements
• Improving our deployment and testing automation pipelines

Basic Requirements of the Senior Software Engineer, Technical Lead:

• BS/MS in Computer Science or equivalent
• 5+ years of professional software development experience
• Strong CS and software engineering fundamentals
• 3+ years of building complex front ends
• Experience with full stack development
• Experience deploying production systems in the cloud (AWS)
• Strong communication skills, written and verbal

Preferred:

• Experience with tools we use every day:
  
  • React/Redux
  • CSS/HTML
  • Build/Run: CodeBuild Serverless, Linux
  • Monitoring: Datadog
  • API integrations w/REST

• Experience with tools we don't use and knowledge of when and how to use them
• Experience in education or ed-tech
• Experience with live product support and remote teams

We celebrate diversity and are committed to creating an inclusive environment for all employees. To that end, we seek to recruit, develop and retain the most talented people from a diverse candidate pool.
Amplify is an Equal Opportunity Employer of Minorities, Females, Protected Veterans and Individuals with Disabilities.
This position may be funded, in whole or in part, through American Recovery & Reinvestment Act funds.
Amplify Education, Inc. is an E-Verify participant.