Senior Software Developer

Sr. Software Developer

Compensation: $19-22USD/hr

• Paid two week company wide closure at calendar year end. 
• 1 week paid time off per quarter - flexibility on timing based on team requirements
• 1 paid Friday off monthly between February and November.

Employment type: Contractor - no additional benefits

Hours of operation: Preference between 9am-5pm EST

Our client wants you to join a startup-to-scaleup journey as a Senior Software Developer. In this fully remote role, you'll work on a schedule that ensures sufficient overlap with the core working hours of the EST timezone, you’ll be part of a team building new products that will be part of our assessments platform. You’ll build new systems, maintain existing systems, lead design, and mentor developers.

The systems you’ll work in are mostly JavaScript and TypeScript, though we have some new code in Go. New apps are React UIs that call well-defined APIs running on AWS API Gateway and Lambda and use NoSQL databases like DynamoDB.

The role is ideal for a quality-focused full-stack developer with strong technical proficiency who is looking to advance their career with a people-centric company that prioritizes work-life balance, invests in continuous growth, and builds products with meaningful social impact.

Client Overview

Our company was founded on the need for a higher education admissions method that looks beyond academic performance and considers the whole student—their unique qualities, experiences, and strengths. 

Today, our solutions help discover, nurture and realize people's potential, supporting holistic success from admissions to graduation for students, education programs, and higher education institutions across North America, the U.K., Australia, and Saudi Arabia.

Our core assessment product, provides education programs with a more holistic view of applicants by evaluating their soft skills. Incorporating insights into the admissions process results in a larger applicant pool, enables student success, and graduates better professionals. Since 2014, our software has been adopted by over 600 higher education programs, and more than 1 million applicants have registered to take the test.

With our core education program management solution, we help medical schools and other health professions programs optimize the complex processes and critical components of their curriculum and student assessments to generate data-driven insights needed to graduate competent future healthcare professionals. 

With our fast-growing data and insights solution, Analytics, we leverage critical integrations with our data warehouse and powerful dashboards to provide medical schools with deep insights and intelligence on student and program performance, powering real-time decision-making and continuous quality improvement.

What Skills Should You Bring?

• 6+ years with backend JavaScript and TypeScript
• 6+ years with Go and React
• Knowledge of distributed systems and cloud platforms
• Experience with AWS / MongoDB + Postgres

You need to be comfortable working on full-stack web applications. You can change UIs, APIs, database schemas, or deployment pipelines as needed. Ideally, you've worked on and led large system migrations. Preferably, you’ve experienced one migration that’s gone well (so you recognize success) but also one that was challenging (so you've learned from mistakes).

What Will You Work On?

Our team owns multiple new products that will be part of our assessments platform. We have initial projects underway but by no means is the plan fully defined. As a senior-level developer, you have opinions on design tradeoffs in this space and can articulate them in productive debates with the team, weighing short vs. long-term impact. You'll be the glue between leaders in Product and the rest of the development team. You'll work directly with product managers to prioritize features and improvements. It's essential that your technical perspective informs what's possible. Your opinions are as strong as the data you have to defend them.

Along the way, you will help guide our quality improvements. We expect you to be familiar with techniques and processes such as pair programming, code reviews, automated testing (unit/integration/end-to-end), feature flagging, monitoring, and alarming. We expect that you will mentor developers to adopt the practices that meet your quality expectations. We also expect that you can articulate the limits of these approaches and know what mix to use for any given problem.

As a Senior Developer it's crucial that you have strong written and verbal communication skills. You should have no problem discussing issues publicly on Slack, ensuring your reasoning is available to anyone when needed. Your project plans, status updates, high-level task summaries should be clear and easy reads. You will contribute all manner of system and architecture diagrams to the wiki to ensure the whole team is aligned with your technical vision. You also know when it’s time to hop on a video call to hash something out.

You're also adept at providing feedback. You can gauge where a developer is at and provide them with specific, actionable feedback to improve. Your commits and pull requests will set the high standard for other developers to follow. Your review comments will be written with empathy and tact where code quality could be improved to meet your professional standards.

Interview Process

Here are the steps you can expect:

• Conversation with Recruiter. Have a 30-minute phone call during which you get to share your professional journey, career interests and assess initial skills.
• Meet the Manager. Spend 45 minutes on a video call with your potential future manager. Discuss your relevant technical work experiences and learn in-depth about the day-to-day of the team and role. 
• Asynchronous Code Review. A brief take-home project that offers you the opportunity to showcase your ability to give feedback and mentor other team members. 
• Meet the Team & Showcase Your Technical Abilities. Meet with 3 more team members, a blend of technical and non-technical people, leaders, future peers and collaborators. You’ll meet 1-1 in a remote setting, go through live coding and system design exercises.