\nWe are hiring a PHP Staff Engineer to focus on backend application work and technical leadership while contributing to DevOps, data, and frontend work as necessary. We’re a small team, so the blend will depend on the individual and the project.\n\n\nIdeal candidates will have an incredibly strong Web SaaS background, a decade or two of Web-based professional history, and a deep comfort with PHP. You are consistently assessing whether technical choices are adding or removing system complexity. You enjoy enabling your teammates to do their best work with clear & appropriate feedback, tailored guidance, and thoughtful workload sharing. You are deeply critical of which technical choices and work will have the most meaningful impact on our goals.\n\n\nThis role offers 160K/yr and participation in our ESOP (Employee Stock Option Program) with a 4-year vesting schedule. If you start by 1 April, you’ll be eligible for the company-wide annual 1 July pay raise. If you’re interested in the role but have questions or feedback, please email the hiring manager. No one’s resume will get buried for being critical, it’s kinda the point of the job.\n\n\nWe will accept applications through Friday, 21 February and begin the email screening process as soon as possible. Initial interviews will ideally be scheduled for 24-27 February, and second interviews the week of 10 March. There are two 90-minute interviews (hiring manager + panel) and we request 3 professional references (but let's talk anyway if you have circumstances that make that impossible). We are filling this role ASAP, preferably no later than 1 April. Please note availability concerns in your application! We can be flexible and are happy to accommodate whenever we can. \n\n\nAbout uConnect \n\n\nuConnect is on a mission to help more people realize their potential by improving access to career services for all people - early in their lives and throughout their careers. Focused on the traditional higher education market, uConnect's All-In-One Virtual Career Center is used by a wide range of institutions including UCLA, MIT, and Baton Rouge Community College to radically improve utilization of career services, career readiness and student outcomes.  We're a mission-driven team working in a fun and collaborative culture which puts people first. uConnect is backed by leading technology investors including Growth Street Partners, Strada Education and LearnLaunch.\n\n\n\nCore responsibilities\n* Collaboratively plan, document, and execute complex web application programming tasks. This is foremost an individual contributor role responsible for shipping.\n* Adhere to team coding standards and architectural principles.\n* Demonstrate advanced knowledge of one or more relevant programming languages in day-to-day use.\n* Demonstrate best practices in submitted code.\n* Make informed decisions about what qualifies as in- and out-of-scope for current tasks and communicate those decisions succinctly and thoroughly.\n* Raise concerns, questions, and ambiguities for team discussion; lead consensus-building.\n* Identify risks in current code, environment, and/or process; recommend alternatives.\n* Add automated low-level tests to code as appropriate.\n* Troubleshoot existing code for defects, performance issues, or other unwanted behavior.\n* Take ownership of overall application code base and be accountable for its long-term health, performance, and alignment with team goals.\n* Take on independent investigations or maintenance projects to enable the rest of the team.\n* Take a leadership role in overall technical decisions and direction.\n* Work cross-functionally with Product, Customer Success, and other stakeholders to identify the best outcomes possible given our goals and constraints.\n\n\n\nSecondary responsibilities\n* Assist with support and bug triage.\n* Assist with CI/CD pipeline as necessary.\n* Assist with E2E tests as necessary.\n* Improve application observability with logging and automated alerting.\n* Explain technical concepts to non-technical stakeholders.\n* Guide and mentor other engineers of all levels with their professional growth and learning.\n* Assist with hiring engineers as requested.\n* Investigate new technologies for applicability to current and future engineering challenges.\n* Monitor the broader technology ecosystem for significant changes and brief team.\n* Respond to priority support incidents during off-hours in rare business-critical situations.\n\n\n\nWhat will a typical day look like?\n* Attend daily engineering standup (Mon-Thu). What’s blocking you, and how can you help your teammates? Sometimes we also do work refinement during this time.\n* Meet with stakeholders and peers to understand and prioritize needs.\n* Programming new product features, upgrading existing functionality, and updating dependencies and pipelines.\n* Performing code review async via pull request or synchronously via Zoom.\n* Validating application functionality through the use of both automated and manual testing.\n* Pairing with another engineer to trade experience or collaborate on a particular challenge. (We encourage pairing as needed and it shouldn’t be “never” but there’s no mandate.)\n* Researching tools, patterns and practices relevant to current or future work.\n* Writing internal documentation about technical choices, runbooks, or team practices.\n* Working with your manager to discuss and implement guidance or technical coaching plans for other engineers.\n* On Fridays (or an equivalent amount of time elsewhere in the week at your discretion), you’re encouraged to pursue team-agreed work that isn’t explicitly toward the product roadmap, like tool upgrades or technical research. We are purposefully targeting 20% of capacity toward maintenance work.\n\n\n\nCore skills & experiences (You check most of these boxes)\n* Building and maintaining Web SaaS products for at least 5 years (12+ is ideal).\n* Advanced programming experience in a Web server context, PHP strongly preferred.\n* Programming experience in JavaScript and HTML/CSS.\n* Advanced SQL query authoring and relational database design constraints.\n* Working remotely with a cross-functional team & collaborating with other engineers.\n* Task refinement & scoping, self-organization, and prioritization.\n* Team-based communication (asking for what they need and conveying challenges and timelines proactively), active listening, and consensus building.\n* Giving and receiving constructive and well-communicated code review feedback.\n* Experience with one or more web application frameworks, especially event-based (as in WordPress, not Kafka).\n* Troubleshooting DNS and web request / server response structures.\n* Validating code using test automation (unit or functional/integration).\n* Controlling major sources of application complexity and managing dependencies thoughtfully.\n\n\n\nAccretive skills (We hope you check a few of these boxes)\n* Using, designing, documenting, and building REST APIs.\n* Experience with WordPress (or similar).\n* Experience using caching layers to improve web application performance.\n* Building & improving CI pipelines (we use BitBucket).\n* Evaluating application-level security and remediation of flaws.\n* Evaluating & implementing accessibility requirements.\n* Experience with data pipelines, feed processing, and/or data migrations.\n* Working with Python (used in our data pipeline), data warehouses, and/or data visualization (We use GCP / BigQuery / Looker).\n* Iterative self-directed learning is second nature to you.\n* You’ve read resources or books like Will Larson’s Staff Engineer and are thoughtful about the strategic role of the Staff Engineer in an organization.\n\n\n\nWhy take this role?\n* High impact, high efficiency, sustainable efforts, & minimal politics. Our entire company culture is oriented to winning together, not individual interests.\n* Truly flexible work schedule with consistent effort to minimize meetings and prioritize individual needs. Unlimited PTO, 15 holidays, plus a mostly-shutdown entire final week of the year.\n* Commitment to a healthy engineering culture with a focus on great documentation, team-based work refinement, and clear acceptance criteria. We’re not done improving how we work.\n* We’re not just “committed to diversity”, we have a diverse & inclusive team and continue to iterate on policies that support it.\n* You're aligned with our mission of improving access to career services & employment outcomes for higher education students by supporting their individual needs.\n* Your 5-year plan could involve deepening your technical skills and focusing on impact as a special project “solver”, becoming the technical lead of a second product team as it forms, or transitioning into an engineering management role. (It likely does not involve becoming an overall project “architect” as that is our principal’s primary role.)\n\n\n\nCompensation package\n* $160,000 annual salary (with annual raise 1 July).\n* 4-year vesting stock options\n* Unlimited PTO (you must use at least 3 weeks; 4-6 is normal)\n* Health insurance (Gold PPO) premium 100% covered for employee & 60% for dependents (Dental 75% for employee & 50% for dependents; Vision 75% for employee)\n* 4% 401K contribution (3% full match + 2% half match)\n* $600 annual home office stipend\n* 12 weeks parental leave (after 1 year)\n* Guaranteed remote work policy (there’s no office)\n\n\n\nHiring process\n* Screening over email (call optional)\n* 90-minute alignment interview (Zoom video)\n* 90-minute functional area interview (Zoom video)\n* Pre-offer stage: (1) 60-minute Meet & Greet with CEO (Zoom video), (2) 3 references (preferably all who worked directly with you for 6 months or more; 1 senior to you in your team or reporting chain)\n* Background check (we do not automatically disqualify applicants for non-violent criminal convictions)\n\n\n\nAbout the team\n* We are fully remote, but require employees reside in the continental US or Canada due to time zones & compliance overhead.\n* We employ 7 full-time engineers (Manager, 4 Application, 1 Data, 1 QA Automation) that lean senior (2 staff-level, 3 senior-level, 2 mid-level, 0 entry — yes, that’s the scale). There is 1 product manager (with plans to grow).\n* No engineers have left the company in 3 years. Our principal engineer has been with the company 12 years. \n* We use a Kanban workflow in Jira (“kanban-like” if we’re being pedantic) with clear acceptance criteria and Gherkin for testing criteria.\n* In 2024, half our tickets were in support of our strategic roadmap, 20% were maintenance work, and the rest were requests (support escalations and other non-roadmap work).\n* We primarily build in a WordPress-based monolith with a few ancillary AWS services.\n* We have managed hosting, so there is no on-call rotation, but as a staff engineer you will be on the short-list of emergency technical contacts. (We had zero emergencies in 2024.)\n* Two years ago, we had zero automated tests. Today, we have more than 500 (300 of which are E2E) and will aggressively increase that number this year, focusing on PHP integration tests in a specific section of the product.\n* We’re publishing our interview plan, onboarding impact plan, and performance review criteria for this role. Our small team works best by being engaged, taking ownership, and exercising critical thinking every day. This role is critical to continuing and expanding that strategy, so consider coming to your interviews with good questions.\n* West coasters beware: Standup is 10:30am ET (Mon-Thu; we don’t have standing meetings on Fridays). It is our team’s only standing meeting (besides 1:1s with your manager and monthly All Hands).\n\n\n\nWhat will your 90-day onboard look like?\n* Weeks 1: Meet people, read docs, complete training, set up your localhost, ask questions. We’re not a “commit code on day 1” shop; relax & adapt. Check in with your manager daily.\n* Weeks 2-4: Dig into team’s current problem set and how you can start contributing now, while also learning medium- and long-term goals to start aligning decisions with them. Join the team’s workflow and complete prioritized work. Check in with your manager a few times a week.\n* Months 2-3: Take work that aligns with your learning goals to quickly expand your exposure to various parts of the product and stack. Make strong contributions, but more biased toward learning than highest priority, tapering back toward priority-based work toward the end of 90-days at the pace that makes sense. Choose a longer-term 1:1 pace.\n\n\n\n\n\n$160,000 - $160,000 a year\n \n\n#Salary and compensation\n No salary data published by company so we estimated salary based on similar jobs related to Design, SaaS, Wordpress, Python, Testing, JavaScript, Education, PHP, Senior, Engineer and Backend jobs that are similar:\n\n $50,000 — $100,000/year\n
\n\n#Benefits\n 💰 401(k)\n\n🌎 Distributed team\n\n⏰ Async\n\n🤓 Vision insurance\n\n🦷 Dental insurance\n\n🚑 Medical insurance\n\n🏖 Unlimited vacation\n\n🏖 Paid time off\n\n📆 4 day workweek\n\n💰 401k matching\n\n🏔 Company retreats\n\n🏬 Coworking budget\n\n📚 Learning budget\n\n💪 Free gym membership\n\n🧘 Mental wellness budget\n\n🖥 Home office budget\n\n🥧 Pay in crypto\n\n🥸 Pseudonymous\n\n💰 Profit sharing\n\n💰 Equity compensation\n\n⬜️ No whiteboard interview\n\n👀 No monitoring system\n\n🚫 No politics at work\n\n🎅 We hire old (and young)\n\n
\n\n#Location\nCambridge, MA or Remote

Higher Education is in crisis. The cost of education is skyrocketing, while only 33% of students in the US graduate in four years and issues of equity and access are worsening.\n\nAt Coursedog, we believe Higher Ed's reliance on outdated software is the root of the problem. 75% of universities operate entirely on legacy, on-premise software, resulting in millions of frustrated students saddled with heaps of debt.\n\nCoursedog's mission is to break down barriers in Higher Education. To do so, we are building a modern operating system for Higher Education: from supercharging the student scheduling experience to empowering administrators with analytics that graduate more students in less time. Our vision is to build software that enables the $800b Higher Education market to reach its highest ideals to facilitate upward mobility, equity and positive change.\n\nCoursedog has raised $23m in venture capital as a hypergrowth startup backed by YC, First Round Capital and has tripled its employee headcount over the last 1.5 years. We were recently ranked in Forbes top 500 US startup employers and our employee engagement scores rank in the top 5% of tech companies. You can learn more about our culture [here](https://coursedog1.notion.site/The-Coursedog-Brain-e49387c1986b46c8ae72d6b98b89adcf).\n\nWe are looking for a QA Engineer to join the Coursedog product engineering team. The ideal candidate will be a proven technologist, passionate about software engineering, testing and user experience.\n\nAs a company, we value diversity and inclusion. We encourage people from underrepresented groups to apply.\n\n**What You Will Do:**\n* Perform manual testing of new features\n* Write end-to-end tests using Cypress (JavaScript testing framework)\n* Write front-end component tests using Cypress\n* Drive innovation to improve application stability\n* Improve engineering processes and tooling\n* Own the QA column in our kanban board\n* Collaborate with product and engineering teams to scope out new features and prepare test plans\n* Understand the needs of our clients to help improve the end-user experience\n\n**About You:**\n* Naturally curious and willing to step into the user’s shoes\n* 3+ years of experience in manual and automated testing\n* Full professional proficiency in English\n* Demonstrated experience with writing automated tests using JavaScript\n* Knowledge of modern JavaScript and best practices\n* Experience working with complicated, enterprise-level systems\n* Owners mentality\n* Comfortable with working in a fully remote, asynchronous team\n* Fast learner\n\n**Bonus Points for Any of These Skills:**\n* BS/MS in Computer Science or related field\n* Familiarity with front-end frameworks such as Vue.js\n* Familiarity with backend technologies such as Node.js and MongoDB\n* Experience working for a high-growth start-up\n* Big + for experience in higher education\n\n**Coursedog Provides:**\n* Flexible work hours - we have no weekly hour minimums or specified work times. Work whenever you want to, at a pace and time of day that you prefer.\n* Expectations of time off - we push all team members to take off at least 17 days per year. However, this is entirely your choice, and time off can be taken whenever you want/need it.\n* Remote-first company - We believe remote work is an approach to work, not just working from home, and spend much of our energy on fostering trust and psychological safety in our digital space. \n\nPlease mention the words **CRAM CRITIC EMPOWER** when applying to show you read the job post completely (#RMjE2LjczLjIxNi4xMzY=). This is a feature to avoid spam applicants. Companies can search these words to find applicants that read this and see they're human.\n\n \n\n#Salary and compensation\n $70,000 — $90,000/year\n
\n\n#Benefits\n ⏰ Async\n\n
\n\n#Location\nWorldwide

\nWho We Are\nQuimbee is one of the most widely used e-learning platforms for law students in the United States. Simply put, our mission is to help law students get A's in their law school courses.\nSince 2007, Quimbee has helped over a hundred thousand law students prepare for classes and final exams. We provide law students with access to a comprehensive database of case summaries, video lessons, practice questions, a legal dictionary, and a growing library of content. We have become one of the most widely used and trusted sites for law students, serving both institutional clients, such as Yale University, American University and University of Illinois, as well as thousands of individual law students.\nWe prefer a small and highly effective engineering team, so every new team member is vital to the success of the company.\nWho Were Looking For\nYou must be an experienced developer with a passion for operations tasks. Technically were mostly interested in your recent DevOps and software development experience, from writing back-end code for a website to optimizing the SQL queries to dealing with search engines, monitoring and performance, and everything in between. But your focus will be on optimizing our app's code, its underlying architecture, and infrastructure so that we minimize surprises while maximizing performance at all levels.\nAs a Site Reliability Engineer, you are responsible for maintaining our core platform and services which our web (Ruby on Rails) and mobile app (React Native) users depend on. As our first SRE, you'll have the opportunity to help us define and shape processes, tools, and best practices in the context of our platform. You'll work closely with our team of developers to determine the current state of our platform as well as defining the future of it.\nWe're looking for collaborative, detail-oriented people who are ready for a challenge. In this role, you'll be responsible for working on the critical task of ensuring our backend systems are rock solid and scalable. Strong candidates will bring strong engineering and operations acumen, combined with the ability to move fast (and fix things).\nYou have to have a special care for writing maintainable and reusable code that every developer on our team can work with, and an ability to collaborate well with cross-functional teams.\nYoull join a small tech team, so your voice will be heard when we need to make new technical decisions as our product grows. We expect you to go beyond coding to give input on the product roadmap, design, and architecture.\nWe look for:\n * A Ruby developer. You have deep software engineering experience and are comfortable writing code in Ruby as well as at least one other programming language.\n * A DevOps advocate. You believe in the benefits of immutable infrastructure and understand what it takes to implement it from the operating system level up to datacenter deployments.\n * A data-driven engineer. You know the difference between an MTTR and MTTD and have the skills necessary to optimize them.\n * A great process and code debugger. You feel comfortable leading robust and thorough root cause analysis (RCA) sessions to attack problems at their core and ensure they dont recur.\n * A self-manager. You take responsibility for projects from idea to completion, proactively seeking assistance as needed while guiding the work to successful outcomes.\n * A versatile engineer. You know what you dont know and feel comfortable learning new skills. Youre not ashamed of recognizing mistakes and take measures to avoid falling again.\n * A team player. You share code-ownership as much as possible. You don't mind fixing other peoples code or stepping in to help a teammate.\n * A minimalist. You believe a new feature should be built only when the evidence supports it. Youre willing to push back when you believe this rule is being ignored or violated.\n * A great communicator. You communicate your ideas, feedback, and criticism thoroughly, clearly, and courteously. You believe theres no such thing as over-explaining or over-clarifying because thats how miscommunication is avoided.\n \n\n* A business-minded engineer. You have deep understanding of the importance of building maintainable, efficient, clean code, while balancing that with the urgency of the business needs.\n\n\nTask Examples\nWorking with us, you could be asked to (solo or as part of a team):\n * Create and maintain documentation about our platform and all the 3rd party services it depends on, defining a plan of development for failover mechanisms to improve our platform's resilience.\n * Investigate issues reported by our automated systems, or our customer support or QA teams, determine impact and root cause, then prioritize and document them, and solve them yourself when possible or sync with our devs team to solve it.\n * Streamline our deployments process so that they are as smooth as possible both for our users as well as for our teams, considering the possibility of having to rollback.\n * Educate engineers throughout the company on how to ensure their projects meet our reliability, performance, and security requirements.\n * Reduce the server-side and front-end latency of our application to deliver a lightning fast user experience.\n * Optimize our hosting bill by increasing throughput and resource efficiency, while planning capacity for the next two years of growth.\n * Determine and configure a core set of metrics and alerts to make sure our apps and servers are running smoothly and that we can react fast if something bad happens.\n * Develop and maintain performance and load tests.\n * Possible on-call responsibilities.\n \n\n\nBenefits\n\nWhat We Offer\n * Join a small team who loves what they do.\n * Work from home.\n * A competitive salary.\n * Healthcare coverage (including dental) for you and your family.\n * Untracked paid time off and sick leave.\n * 401(k) with 3% company matching.\n \n \n\n#Salary and compensation\n No salary data published by company so we estimated salary based on similar jobs related to Admin, Engineer, Sys Admin, React, DevOps, Video, Ruby, Mobile, Legal and Backend jobs that are similar:\n\n $70,000 — $120,000/year\n
\n\n#Benefits\n 💰 401(k)\n\n🌎 Distributed team\n\n⏰ Async\n\n🤓 Vision insurance\n\n🦷 Dental insurance\n\n🚑 Medical insurance\n\n🏖 Unlimited vacation\n\n🏖 Paid time off\n\n📆 4 day workweek\n\n💰 401k matching\n\n🏔 Company retreats\n\n🏬 Coworking budget\n\n📚 Learning budget\n\n💪 Free gym membership\n\n🧘 Mental wellness budget\n\n🖥 Home office budget\n\n🥧 Pay in crypto\n\n🥸 Pseudonymous\n\n💰 Profit sharing\n\n💰 Equity compensation\n\n⬜️ No whiteboard interview\n\n👀 No monitoring system\n\n🚫 No politics at work\n\n🎅 We hire old (and young)\n\n