Backend Engineer

Everyday Speech is a leader in Social-Emotional Learning. Primarily a teaching solution for public schools, our Social-Emotional Learning Platform (SELP) provides educators with curriculum materials for students of ALL ages across special education and general education classes. Our curriculums teach students the strategies and life skills they need to regulate their emotions, solve problems, cope with the stresses of modern life, and interact with the world around them. Our platform is used by 25,000+ educators at public schools and private educational institutions around the world.

Everyday Speech is right for you if:

You care about making a positive impact.

End each day knowing that your work had a direct impact on the well-being of hundreds of thousands of at-risk students across the world. Project success means more than just shipping features - it means improving the lives of students and educators. 

You value being a part of a company that takes care of its team.

Not only do we have extremely happy team members, we also have incredible perks. Participate in our health/wellness and retirement benefit offerings, and between having every other Friday off (3-day weekends!) after you’ve been with us for 90 days, plus our 3 weeks of PTO, 8 fully-customizable chosen holidays, and a sick policy that focuses on your wellness and healing, you’re looking at 50+ days off a year - that elusive work-life balance is an actual thing here. The Product Team specifically has a strong culture and deep camaraderie. Check out this video we recently shared with the entire company. 

You want to work for a true, remote-only company.

We’ve never had an office and never will. Our team is spread across 8 countries and 4 continents. We take remote work seriously and know how to support a distributed team. We give you the flexibility to work in a way that’s best for you, but still have high standards and accountability.

You want to join a startup that is seeing massive growth.

We’ve expanded from 5 to 60+ full-time team members in just 4 years! As a fully bootstrapped company, our growth is organic and sustainable. Our focus is delivering value to students and educators, not paying back investors.

In this role, you will:

• Build and maintain backend applications in a distributed architecture.

• Improve the code quality and app stability by expanding test coverage and following  development best practices.

• Work with Product Managers to transform business requirements into features that are used by tens of thousands of teachers around the world.

In the short term (the first 3 months), hit the ground running. You’ll  Work alongside PMs and customer-facing team members to ensure app stability and improve the codebase as you deliver new features.
Key responsibilities include:

• Diving into our database, documentation library, and system architecture, quickly getting up to speed with how our development environment works.

• With guidance from the business stakeholders and engineering team, write up engineering and technical specs for features you'll be working on

• Working with both web (Angular) and iOS developers to independently develop features from scratch and create pull requests.

• Supporting features integration between the backend, client apps, and services

• Joining a collaborative engineering culture, which includes doing code reviews for the other backend engineers on the team

The work you do will have a direct impact on the well-being of hundreds of thousands of at-risk students across the country and the world.

In the Long term, you will be more independent and take the lead on bigger projects, becoming an indispensable member of our growing engineering team.

Key responsibilities include:

• Working alongside our Senior Engineers to ideate strategy for major (yearly) product releases.

• Identifying technical debt and suggesting improvements to our systems and internal processes

• Taking ownership of feature releases, working closely alongside frontend engineers, designers, and PMs

• Implementing and maintaining integration with 3rd party services and external services in our environment

• Helping to scale our backend development infrastructure so our services can be used by more students around the world and have a positive impact on their lives.

• Working closely with our front-end and iOS engineers to build cutting-edge educational tools such as Interactive Video

• Sharing your experience and knowledge with the development team through our Developers' Guild

What We’re Looking For:

The ability to be…

• Self-sufficient and solve problems independently, reaching out for assistance when needed.

• Consistently accurate and precise by having a strong eye for details.

• A clear communicator, being open with team members and advocating for what you need for project success.

• Reliable when estimating project scope, and asking questions when things are not clear.

• Detailed and organized when writing thorough technical documentation 

Technical skills:

Must have:

• 3+ years of experience as a backend developer, with a focus on javascript and Node.js

  • Development experience with object-oriented JavaScript

  • Proficient understanding of code versioning tools (Git)

  • Experience developing RESTful APIs

• Experience with PostgreSQL or another relational database 

• Experience with TDD

  • Unit Tests

  • Integration Tests

Nice to have:

• Understanding of Distributed Architecture

• Understanding of Angular

• Typescript

• Experience with AWS (S3, API Gateway, Cloudfront)

We’re open to US and international (contractor) hires (the majority of our current engineering team works from Brazil), but you must be able to work US / ET hours with at least a 4-hour overlap between 9am-1pm EST. 

Annual pay: $60,000 USD

Benefits 

For US Hires:

• United Healthcare health insurance - 100% premium coverage for team members and 50% coverage for dependents

• Dental and Vision coverage - 100% premium coverage for team members and 50% coverage for dependents

• 3% employer-match on 401k

• $50k life insurance / AD&D

• 3 weeks paid vacation per year + 8 “choose your own” floating holidays

• Separate sick leave policy

• Home office reimbursements

• Meaningful DEIB (diversity, equity, inclusivity, and belonging) initiatives with optional employee panel participation

• Every other Friday off after 90 days!  

For International Contractors 

• Wellness Reimbursement Policy

• Retirement Savings Reimbursement Policy

• 3 weeks paid vacation per year + 8 "choose your own" floating holidays

• Separate sick leave policy

• Home office Reimbursements

• Meaningful DEIB (diversity, equity, inclusivity, and belonging) initiatives with optional employee panel participation

• Every other Friday off after 90 days! 

About Our Engineering Interview Process