Over the last 10 years, Ellevation Education has built a thriving business serving the administrators, teachers, and specialists who support English Learners at public schools across the US. Today, over 1,000 school districts use our software to manage their EL programs. We are a successful, rapidly growing business with a real mission -- helping English Learners achieve all they possibly can.

We are currently setting up a new team to build systems to capture and report on key usage data from our products.

We are looking for a Staff Engineer to lead the development of these systems – someone with deep experience implementing databases to support both product-level and overall strategic decision-making within a company.

As a staff engineer and tech lead, you’ll guide the work of a small team of engineers, providing both overall architectural leadership and steady, in-the-trenches mentorship. You'll partner with a product manager to achieve key strategic outcomes around visibility into product usage.

To succeed, you will have experience building data warehouse or data lake systems to support both strategic and tactical decision-making. You have deep experience both in how to design schemas for reporting and analytics and also in building systems to reliably extract, transform, and load data. You are comfortable weighing tradeoffs, generating options, and assessing risks.

As an architect, you’ll also be a part of broader discussions that guide the overall evolution of Ellevation’s architecture -- and, in so doing, you’ll help people across the engineering team level up on complex system design and implementation.

We look for experienced engineers who are excited to use their technical skills and experience in support of a mission-driven company.

Impact

• 1 Month: You will have developed an understanding of the current reporting systems plus the most important questions the business wishes to answer. You will have built relationships with both stakeholders (who must make decisions) and engineering teams (whose systems hold the data required to make those decisions well). You will have developed a first-order understanding of what kinds of data you’ll need to collect – spanning transactional records from production systems, click-tracking data from the browser, and possibly including configuration metadata about overall customer accounts.
• 3 Months: You will have proposed, gathered feedback on, and started to implement an overall architecture for the product analytics systems. This will likely be developed with a mix of technology currently in use at Ellevation (e.g. Python, SQLServer, Spark) along with specialized technology for analytics and ETL (e.g. possibly Snowflake, or DBT). You will help decide how to balance between those two. You will be providing mentorship to early-career engineers on your team, and helping guide their day-to-day work.
• 6 Months: Along with your product partner, you will be helping stakeholders make key decisions in a small number of areas of the business. You will have built a reliable means to extract data from production systems, and helped establish expectations with the owners of those systems around long-term responsibility for the continued export of data. You will have provided access to your collected and refined data to other decision-making systems at Ellevation.
• 12 Months: You will have established consistent technical patterns for product teams to load their data into the shared store. Your systems will have become indispensable for both product- and overall business-level decision making. You will have helped Ellevation become a more data-driven company.

About You

•  You have 5+ years of software development experience
•  You have deep expertise in designing, implementing and operating reporting and analytics systems, ideally in cloud environments
•  You have deep experience with relational databases
•  Python experience a plus - most data engineering is done in Python
•  You have at least 1 year of experience leading a small team of engineers
•  You have a strong track record of helping the engineers on your teams learn and grow
•  You demonstrate an eagerness to learn from others

At Ellevation, we develop world-class software to help school districts and educators support the fastest growing population of K-12 students: English Language Learners (ELLs). Ellevation helps school districts transform their EL programs and ensure all students can achieve their highest aspirations with a best-in-class data and instructional planning platform, resources to build teacher capacity, and student-facing programs to teach academic language.

We are a fast-growing, mission-driven technology company, partnering with over 1,200 school districts and more than 3 million current and former EL students. Over the next five years we are focused on doubling the number of students we serve and driving measurable outcomes for students. We are well-capitalized, have a strong team, and are continuously focused on how to build the best organization so that we can achieve our ambitious social and financial objectives.

In addition to our great benefit plans and competitive salaries, here are some other perks that make us unique:

+ Great location in Boston - a stone’s throw from the Chauncy Street/Downtown Crossing T stop (We are currently working 100% remotely due to COVID-19)

+ Ability to make a significant impact in the education industry

+ Fun Fridays including virtual happy hours with our remote team

+ Free snacks, beverages, fruit, and we even compost!

+ On-site gym, game room and darts to support all levels of athleticism

+ Opportunity to join an open and collaborative work environment!

Here at Ellevation, we champion diversity, inclusion, equity, and belonging. We strive to build a team that reflects the diverse communities we serve. We’re an equal opportunity employer, committed to creating an inclusive workplace that promotes and values a range of ideas and opinions. We embrace all types of differences in the development of our organization. We are proud to have been recognized in prior years as “Best Tech Workplace for Diversity” from the Timmy Awards for investing in trainings around inclusive behaviors, microaggressions, unconscious bias, and fostering a culture of sharing educational resources across the company. We are encouraged by our progress, but there’s more work to be done.

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