Director of Engineering [LA Based]

Jumpcut is a Y Combinator and venture-backed startup that creates cinematic online courses with the world’s biggest influencers.

The founding team at Jumpcut has years of experience creating binge-worthy content — we’ve created multiple viral YouTube channels that now have over 4.5 million subscribers and over 500 million views. We’re now taking that content creation experience and applying it to the monotonous world of online education.

If you’ve ever taken an online course, you already know that 99% of them suck. That’s because they all do the same thing: record a dry and uninspiring instructor who talks to the camera for hours on end. While this is fantastic for getting over an Ambien addiction, it’s atrocious for actual learning.

Think about what can be done with video: we have the ability to create things like Avatar, The Dark Knight, and Game of Thrones, but the status quo when it comes to online courses is this. In an ice cream parlor of unlimited flavors, every other online education company has opted for vanilla. We have our eye on the mint triple chocolate chip birthday cake cookie dough with strawberry whipped cream and banana nut sprinkles.

Our team is approaching online learning in a completely new way: combining educational content with compelling stories, captivating cinematography, creative soundtracks, and much more. The result is a beautiful course that feels like a movie. We believe the future of education lies in creating world-class content.

If you want to learn more about our vision, check out our blog post about the future of education: http://bit.ly/2o3WpFH

Here’s a visual example of the difference between most online courses, and ours: http://bit.ly/2naxBqx

WHAT THE JOB ENTAILS:

You'll be running Jumpcut’s engineering team, which consists of 6 remote engineers right now.

Given our small team size, this is not a full time management position -- you'll be spending 50% of the time coding and 50% of the time managing.

The management portion of the job, specifically, is not administrative. It’s closely related to what a senior engineer/architect would do, such as:

1. Code review and pushing PRs. You’ll be the most senior engineer on the team, responsible for code review, final testing, and pushing the PR live.

2. Educating the team. If someone asks where videos are stored, you’ll show them the url, the Cloudfront distro, and how the Cloudfront distro is tied to an s3 bucket. You’ll also be creating documentation (or assigning others to do this) on every part of the app so that our engineers can find the answers for themselves.

3. Organization building. You’ll create the conventions for code quality and style, as well as the process for code review that involves the entire team. You’ll create the metrics that measure our team’s effectiveness so we can track the velocity of the team.

4. Turning the Product Manager’s task requests into engineering tasks. When the product team wants to implement a new feature, you’ll take their business requirements to create the engineering task, keeping in mind all dependencies (Metabase, analytics, etc).Task assignment and developer happiness. You’ll be checking in with each team member to ensure they’re growing in their skills. You’ll assign them the week’s worth of sprint tasks. You’ll train them to become better at their jobs. You’ll be clearing blockers the team encounters hour by hour.

In terms of ramp up, you’ll be working primarily as a developer for the first month, and slowly transitioning into these above management responsibilities after a month.

WHAT YOU'LL DO:

• Full stack development
• Work closely with rest of organization to maintain and organize a roadmap of product priorities
• Transform rough ideas into clear functional features, starting with the big picture down to every little edge case
• Write and publish clear specs for the team to use during development cycles
• Define and follow metrics in order to evaluate projects, before and after their release
• Work closely with design and engineering to ensure features are built and tested to spec
• Evaluate candidates in our engineering hiring funnel and run all hiring rounds

WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR:

• A great cultural fit
• Web development should be in your blood
• Comprehensive experience with HTML, CSS and “proper” JavaScript (e.g. quickly markup a web app and connect it to the back-end data store through REST interface, implemented with Node.js)
• Strong opinions on web design and design philosophies
• Extensive experience of designing relational data models and implementing them with any relational database system
• Object-Oriented Programming ninja
• Good knowledge of different network protocols
• Ability to do everything: write OOP JavaScript all the way to solving nasty CSS browser compatibility issues
• Experience with command line tools a plus
• Extensive Git experience and some open source experience a plus
• Prior experience of collaborating on large software project a plus
• Able to create mockups with Photoshop a plus
• Experience with setting up an AWS instance a plus
• Experience with React a HUGE plus

WHAT STACK WE USE:

• Node.js
• React / Redux
• PostgreSQL
• HTML / CSS / Javascript
• AWS

INTERESTED?

Please apply formally to the job via our website: http://jumpcut.com/about#careers.