\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

\n\n\nDescription:\nWe are looking for Senior Front-End Engineers (full-time contractors) based in South America to join the engineering team to help with our ongoing growth and expansion! Your focus would be on building frontend experiences in React. Familiarity with backend services & technologies is a plus, particularly in Ruby on Rails. We have a complete CI/CD software lifecycle and an evolving services-oriented-architecture hosted in AWS. We operate in a highly collaborative environment with Product and Design to build experiences that matter to our customers. At Varsity Tutors, engineers do not just write code, they actively participate in the conversation on what and how to build the systems and solutions that matter to our customers. If you love your customers as much as we do, we'd love to hear from you.\nAbout Nerdy:\nNerdy (NYSE: NRDY), the parent company of Varsity Tutors, is a leading platform for live online learning, with a mission to transform the way people learn through technology. The Company’s purpose-built proprietary platform leverages technology, including Machine Learning and AI (Nerdy AI Learning Products - Press Release), to connect learners of all ages to experts, delivering superior value on both sides of the network. Nerdy’s comprehensive learning destination provides learning experiences across 3,000+ subjects and multiple formats—including one-on-one instruction, small group classes, large format group classes, on-demand study support, and adaptive self-study. Nerdy’s flagship business, Varsity Tutors, is one of the nation’s largest platforms for live online tutoring and classes. Its solutions are available directly to students and consumers, as well as through schools and other institutions. Learn more about Nerdy at https://www.nerdy.com/.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \nNerdy’s shareholder letters below explain the product and strategy and are the most effective way to learn about what the company is building.\n\nQ1-2024 Shareholder Letter\n\nQ4-2023 Shareholder Letter\n\nQ3-2023 Shareholder Letter\n\n\n\n \nQualifications:\n\n\nExperience with with React and Ruby on Rails is strongly preferred.\n\nExperience with deployment systems (e.g. GitHub Actions, AWS CodeDeploy).\n\nFamiliarity with AWS Services (e.g. RDS, Lambda, EC2, et cetera).\n\nFamiliarity with the Linux operating system and command-line tools.\n\nUnderstanding of OO design, algorithms, and data structures.\n\nAptitude to quickly learn new languages and technologies as necessary.\n\nExperience developing websites that are visited by thousands of visitors daily.\n\nExperience with enhancing SEO performance.\n\nUnderstand and appreciate that Nerdy is an apolitical company and that we can have the largest impact if we are united in our focus on helping people learn and not divided or distracted by advancing unrelated causes.\n\nComputer Science or related degree preferred.\n\nFluent in English.\n\n\n\n Responsibilities:\n\n\nWrite performant, maintainable code that is easy to read and well-documented.\n\nWrite automated tests to thoroughly validate the correctness of your code.\n\nDeploy large-scale web applications.\n\nHave a focus on quality, and operate iteratively to get from good to better.\n\nBe a part of your team’s on-call rotation; we all own our code end-to-end from development to deployment to operations.\n\nCome ready to learn from some of the best and brightest in the industry.\n\nWork independently and collaboratively in a dynamic and fast-moving team.\n\nBe effective in a team environment working with fellow engineers, product management, and design.\n\n\n\n\n \nNerdy Leadership Principles\nRelentless Focus on Customers * Comfort with Ambiguity * Ownership * Simplify * Intellectual Curiosity * Build Teams * Think Big * Insist on High Standards * Bias for Action * Build Trust * Go Deep * Have Conviction * Deliver Results * Are Right, a Lot\n \nBenefits:\n\n\nCompetitive Pay (USD)\n\n\n* \nFully Remote Position\n\n\n\nFlexible Paid Time Off\n\n\n* \nFree Learning Membership for you and your household (1-1 tutoring hours, unlimited use of on-demand services, and access to our online classes)\n\n\n* \nWork for a leading U.S.-based learning technology company\n\n\n* \nA once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to help transform how the world learns!\n\n\n* \nA fun, collaborative, and team-oriented work environment with plenty of training and a feedback-rich culture\n\n\n\n\n \nNerdy is committed to creating a diverse environment and is proud to be an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, gender, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, national origin, genetics, disability, age, or veteran status.\n\n\n \n\n#Salary and compensation\n No salary data published by company so we estimated salary based on similar jobs related to Design, React, Ruby, SEO, Senior, Engineer and Backend jobs that are similar:\n\n $60,000 — $105,000/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\nSan José, San José, Costa Rica

Our Growth Mindset (The Mission):\nThink back on your time in school and a project or experience that got you fired up, curious, and motivated to try your best.  Can you remember one? If you’re like us, there are some projects we remember decades later -- those times when we were so engaged in what we were doing that we couldn’t help but learn.\n\nSeesaw is a learning platform that brings educators, students and families together to deepen student learning. Teachers design and facilitate powerful learning experiences, students create, reflect, collaborate and make their learning visible, and families actively support and celebrate student learning. Seesaw is used by millions of K-12 students in over half the schools in the U.S.\n\nThe Curriculum (Your Role):\nWe’re looking for a Senior Full-Stack Engineer to help deliver product experiences that delight students, teachers, and families. All of our product teams are truly responsible for end-to-end feature development which means depending on the product team you work on and your background you may work on everything from data modeling, architecting a new system or API, or working on user facing product UI. We're currently looking for folks with substantial frontend experience in particular.\n\nYour Classmates (The Team):\nYou’ll primarily be working with teammates on one of our product teams, each of which owns a portion of the Seesaw product and audience. Currently we have teams organized around (1) our core "learning loop" used by teachers, families, and students, (2) our paid product for schools, (3) our messaging service, and (4) our platform team that builds the systems and patterns that support our other teams. But, we're a small team and you'll work closely with all other engineers, PMs, and Designers on our broader product and engineering team.\n\nA little about us:  \nWe are well funded and have an experienced team. Work with the creators & leads of Google Calendar, Picasa, Maps, Facebook Platform, and Twitter.\nWe care about building a diverse and inclusive team to better advocate for the needs of our incredibly diverse K-12 users.\nWe prioritize work-life balance and actually walk the walk -- we care a lot about our work, but care more about our friends and family.  We encourage everyone to work at a sustainable pace and have an unlimited vacation policy that people actually use.\nWe offer competitive compensation and comprehensive benefits including full medical, dental, and vision coverage, 401(k) with company match, paid parental leave, flexible vacation policy, free lunch, wellness stipend, and charitable donation match.\n\n\n\nDon't let the confidence gap get in the way of applying! We'd love to hear from you.\n\nSeesaw provides equal employment opportunities (EEO) to all employees and applicants for employment without regard to race, religious creed, color, sex, sex stereotype, gender, gender identity/gender expression/transgender, national origin, ancestry, physical or mental disability, medical condition, genetic information/characteristics, marital status/registered domestic partner status, age, sexual orientation, or military or veteran status. In addition to federal law requirements, Seesaw complies with applicable state and local laws governing nondiscrimination in employment in every location in which the company has facilities. This policy applies to all terms and conditions of employment, including recruiting, hiring, placement, promotion, termination, layoff, recall, transfer, leaves of absence, compensation and training. \n\n#Salary and compensation\n No salary data published by company so we estimated salary based on similar jobs related to Senior, Engineer, Full Stack, Front End, Executive, Developer, Digital Nomad and Medical jobs that are similar:\n\n $65,000 — $122,500/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