Senior Full Stack Web Engineer

Nurturing critical wisdom for the sake of the world

Why should you join Minerva? The salary and benefits are competitive; the people you’ll work with are authentic, thoughtful, driven, and human;

but the reason we chose Minerva is our strong belief in the company’s mission : if we want to change the world, it’s imperative that we improve education everywhere.

As our first step to achieving that goal, we built Minerva University from the ground up, refining and improving every aspect of a traditional university.

Minerva University boasts , , and ; and has been named the most innovative university in the world - . Now, we are expanding our reach and impact by partnering with emerging and established higher education institutions around the world.

Our methodology, which emphasizes active class participation, deliberate practice, and other empirically-proven methods is enabled by Minerva Forum.

Built to address the central educational challenges of the modern era, Minerva Forum embodies the leading research on the science of learning to enable the rapid development of sophisticated, durable skills based programs.

We need your help to build the next generation of Minerva Forum. You’ll be part of a small and nimble team that works in close consultation with other teams including product management, design, marketing, academic, and company leadership.

We’re big on collaboration, knowledge-sharing, and cross-training; and we end every cycle with a retrospective, so if something’s not working for us, we fix it.

Over the medium term, you will receive significant mentoring, feedback, and deliberate career development.

We are still growing. There are plenty of high-value and challenging green field projects. We are also shifting many projects from prototypes and MVPs to thoughtfully designed long-lived systems.

This is an opportunity to do interesting and important work, and to do it right.

Many of our engineers have been with us for years, and those who leave often come back. For many of us, this is the best job we’ve ever had.

It gives us a chance to build something long-lasting, leave a legacy, and add meaning to our career.

We hope you will join us as we figure out what’s next.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, deploy, operate, and maintain software across the stack.
• Develop, articulate, and prioritize software requirements by working closely with product managers, designers, and partner success teams.
• Use data-driven development and decision making to improve the performance, robustness, and scalability of our systems.
• Maintain and expand automated test coverage and QA processes to catch bugs early.
• Recognize where personal human touch is important, and help people focus their energy on this by automating the rest.
• Use collaborative activities like pair programming and code review as avenues for teaching and learning. Be receptive to feedback from your teammates and generous with your own.
• Support a culture of code quality, documentation, and thoughtful design tradeoffs. Navigate between shipping sooner and long-term maintainability.

Technologies, tools, and processes

We value your ability to learn quickly, make thoughtful tradeoffs, and build maintainable systems, over your past experience with specific technologies.

That said, here are some of the tools that we use :

• Python, Django, and Django REST Framework for building applications and APIs.
• Celery for asynchronous jobs and workflows.
• MySQL and Redis for data storage and caching.
• React and Typescript for building front-end JavaScript interfaces.
• WebRTC with our own selective forwarding unit (SFU) for real-time video.
• Autobahn pubsub technology to support the many features of our real-time distributed seminar classroom.
• ShareDB for collaborative multi-user documents.
• JupyterHub Servers for supporting interactive code workbooks.
• GitHub, CircleCI, codecov, Kubernetes, AWS, and DataDog for building, reviewing, testing, shipping, and operating our systems.
• Slack for collaborating with local and remote coworkers, for integrating code review, deployment, and infrastructure notifications into a social space, and for sharing important GIFs and pet photos.

We value empathy, candor, substantive feedback, fast iteration loops, and openness to experimentation over a specific software development process.

Here are some tools we use to plan, calibrate, and organize :

• Use the unit of an episode to align planning and goal-setting across teams. Each episode is 3 months long, and is broken up into 4 3-week cycles for shorter term focus.
• Plan high-level development themes at the beginning of each episode.
• Plan tactically at the beginning of each cycle.
• Run mini to design, prototype, and test ideas.
• Gather at a weekly team meeting to reflect on the past week and discuss priorities and collaboration for the coming week.
• Check in through a daily asynchronous standup in Slack to foster accountability, remove blockers, and keep others updated.
• Conduct cross-functional twice per episode.
• Organize structured peer feedback sessions twice per year.
• Support each other giving internal brown-bag technical talks.

Benefits

• Mission-oriented team and organization
• Sustainable working pace
• Unlimited vacation policy
• Excellent healthcare coverage for US residents and comparable healthcare stipend globally
• Generous paid parental leave : 12 weeks for moms and 6 weeks for dads
• Competitive salary and stock compensation

Equal Employment Opportunity

To build a university for 21st century leaders and creators, our team should be representative of our diverse student body.

Minerva values a diverse workplace and strongly encourages women, people of color, LGBTQIA individuals, people with disabilities, members of ethnic minorities, foreign-born residents, and veterans to apply.

Minerva is an equal opportunity employer. Applicants will not be discriminated against because of any characteristic irrelevant to creating great software, including : race, color, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, age, religion, national origin, disability, ancestry, marital status, veteran status, medical condition or any protected category prohibited by local, state or federal laws.

How to Apply

Interested? We make applying quick and easy. Please provide :

• A copy of your resume or a link to something resume-like (, your website, LinkedIn)
• Other links you'd like us to see (, blog, GitHub, a project of yours)
• A brief description of why you are excited for this opportunity to join Minerva. This description replaces the traditional cover letter.
30+ days ago