Sr. Backend Django Software Engineer - SchooLinks

SchooLinks is a venture-backed ed-tech company that is changing how students explore and pursue their post-high school goals. We have a suite of over 80 tools for students and school staff including college application management, course planning, financial situations, personality assessments, college profiles, and many others.

We're looking for a highly experienced Django back-end engineer who will write high-quality code, make sound and scalable architectural decisions, and help grow our team by bringing and evangelizing best practices.

Presently, we're only looking for US-based engineers. We do not have the ability to sponsor H1-B Visas.
Additionally, please note this role is for highly experienced software engineers with deep Django and Django Rest Framework (DRF) experience.

What you'll do:

• Ship clean, readable, and maintainable backend Django code
• Contribute and proactively elevate the quality of our codebase by writing tests and addressing technical debt
• You'll be working with a talented team of engineers, designers, and product people who have shipped 50+ features in the last 3 years and have established SchooLinks as a company that has found product-market fit and transitioned us into a hyper-growth phase.
• Participate in the product development process from start to finish, reviewing requirements and user stories to provide timely and meaningful feedback.
• Design and build solutions that will scale to millions of users

Requirements

• 5+ years ofDjango and Dango Rest Framework experience
• 3 + years of experience working with AWS
• 3+ years of experience working with SQL databases in production
• Experience building, supporting, and planning production
• Experience with asynchronous task management

Nice to have -- experience with the following technology that we use regularly:

• Celery
• Redis
• React.js

Domain experience/interest in the following areas is a bonus:

• ETL and data integration with third-party systems such as Student Information Systems
• Educational data
• Workforce development and career exploration
• Predictive analytics around educational outcomes

We may consider exceptional candidates that have slightly less experience, but this is not a role for junior engineers.

Interview Process

1. Recorded Video Questions -- If we think based on your application and resume that you'd potentially be a good fit, we will send you a link to a program that asks you some questions about yourself and Django/BE development. This video will go to our engineering leads/management to watch and decide if they'll take you through the interview process. The recording takes less than 15 min. If you're curious about our rationale for including this interview recording step in our process, you can read more here.

2. Live Coding Challenge - we'll have you make a simple Django app from scratch and test your knowledge of Django (models, ORM, migrations, etc) and DRF (class-based views, viewsets, serializers, class-based filters, etc.). You will do this challenge over Zoom/ GoogleMeet with one of our engineers

3. Requirement Planning Challenge- We will give you designs + requirements and a series of questions to gauge your understanding of the designs and see what questions you would need to ask about this project to be able to plan your implementation. This is to test your communication skills, planning ability, and product sensibilities. You will be given the information ahead of time and we expect you to spend 2 hours prepping and thinking about

Benefits

• Competitive Salary
• Part of a remote-friendly company and a fully remote team/pod
• Flexible working hours and healthy asynchronous working practices
• Long term employment with considerations for promotion and raises every 6 months
• For US-based candidates:
• Full health (healthcare, vision, dental, ClassPass, etc.)
• Company 401k Program with up to 1% matching