Tech Lead

PLEASE APPLY HERE: https://upchieve.welcomekit.co/jobs/tech-lead_brooklyn

About

About UPchieve

UPchieve is an edtech nonprofit that provides free, 24/7 online tutoring and college counseling to low-income high school students in the U.S. Using our app, students can request and get paired with a live, volunteer tutor in under 5 minutes. Our mission is to democratize access to academic support so that all students have an equal opportunity to finish high school, attend college, and achieve upward mobility. So far, we’ve matched 75,000+ on-demand tutoring requests from 20,000+ students across all 50 states. Our work has also been recognized by Forbes and TIME, and our funders include both Y Combinator and the Gates Foundation.

Who we’re looking for

We’re a small team taking on the monumental challenge of democratizing access to academic support. That means we need team members who are excited by autonomy and willing to work on projects outside the scope of their job description if needed. Regardless of role, we also look for candidates who have a personal connection to our cause or a demonstrable interest in education or serving low-income populations.

About Our Team & Office

• We’re a remote-first team located across the U.S.
• We highly value diversity of experiences and perspectives. 2/3 of the team are people of color, and many of us have personal experience growing up low-income or navigating nontraditional educational pathways
• We believe working full-time means 40 hours/week. Non-work stuff is important too!

Our Benefits

• 3 weeks paid vacation AND 3 weeks of paid holidays (including all days between Christmas Eve and New Year’s Day)
• Flexible work schedule (choose your own hours)
• $1,000 annual professional development budget (learning and self-improvement is a huge part of our work culture!)
• Up to 100% covered health insurance for you and your family
• Half-day Fridays during summer

Job Description

About the role

UPchieve is looking for an experienced engineer to step into the role of Tech Lead for our small team. In this role, you’ll help other engineers overcome technical challenges, make key decisions like what tooling to use or how to architect new features, and lead others to accomplish ambitious product goals on time. UPchieve is working to scale free tutoring to all 8 million low-income high school students in the U.S. by 2030. We need an amazing engineer with enough vision, drive, and influence to help us get us there.

This might be the right job for you if…

• You’re scrappy and entrepreneurial. If you don’t know how to do something, you’ll find someone to ask or read The Internet™ until you can
• You’re excited by the challenge of building a platform on par with other successful consumer-facing educational platforms like Khan Academy and Duolingo
• You still enjoy coding and want to spend at least 50% of your time doing it for the foreseeable future
• You love to learn and help others learn; mentorship comes naturally to you
• You have high quality standards and take pride in a clean and well organized code base
• You want to work closely with UPchieve’s leadership and grow into a Head of Engineering role in the next few years

What you’ll do

• Software development (50%)

  • Architect and implement new features
  • Proactively review other team members’ code

• Technical leadership (30%)

  • Own and guide the technical roadmap and development workflow.
  • Delegate tasks and achieve weekly, monthly, and quarterly goals
  • Collaborate with the Product Lead to groom and organize sprints
  • Develop technical aspects of the company’s strategy to ensure alignment with business goals.
  • Audit and optimize our current technical tools, structure, and processes to improve velocity
  • Identify risks and form contingency plans as soon as possible

• People management (20%)

  • Build and foster our tech team
  • Motivate staff and create a space where they can ask questions and voice their concerns
  • Invest into the mentorship and professional development of more junior engineers to ensure growth
  • Analyze existing operations and schedule training sessions and meetings to discuss improvements as needed
  • Collaborate with the Product Lead to create and deliver quarterly presentations to the organization on the team’s progress

Preferred Experience

We’re looking for someone who...

• Has 5+ years of full-stack app development and demonstrable proficiency with JavaScript/TypeScript
• Has been a member of multiple different engineering teams and seen various development processes in play
• (Bonus) Has prior experience with our tech stack: Node.js, React Native, Vue.js, WebSockets, TypeScript, PostgreSQL
• (Bonus) Has prior experience with devops, people management, and/or QA
• (Bonus) Is interested in open source

Interview Process

Our process: Screening call (~30 mins) → Project (max 3 hours) → Interviews (~3 hours) → (Optional) Team meet-and-greet → Reference checks & offer!

Note that it can take us a few weeks from when you submit your application to invite you to a screening call. Unfortunately, we can typically only bring the top ~15 candidates forward to screening calls (which for some roles may work out to < 10% of applicants).