\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

**As a Senior Software Engineer you will join Aula to shape the future of Education and build a platform that educators and students love.**\n\nOur small team of 14 developers has grown fast in the last few months and we need more senior engineers to help us scale our organisation and product. \n\nWhat’s the role about \n* Full Remote Permanent Role > GMT -5 to GMT +3\n* £70,000 - £100,000 depending on location and experience\n* React, Redux, Node.js, MongoDB, AWS Lambda/serverless environment.\n\n**Some of the things you will do**\n\nAs a senior engineer on the team you will be involved in building both products and the team. That means, you will:\n* Be user centric: attend user interviews and measure success based on user metrics.\n* Build new features from the ground up, Help product managers scope and define features, plan sprints and ensure they are delivered\n* Contribute to improving our existing product.\n* Ensure consistency, performance, and reliability across platforms: desktop web, iOS & Android.\n* Be happy to provide production support, system diagnosis and troubleshooting.\n\n** Some of the things you may need to do the Job **\nWe are looking for passionate senior engineers who care about making education more engaging for students.\n* 5+ years Engineering experience, ideally across the stack.\n* Experience building products from design to delivery, ideally within a SaaS company.\n* Product mindset. Ability to break down work into deliverables that bring value to users.\n* Proven track record of working and communicating effectively with Product Managers, Design, Data and Support.\n* Experience coaching, mentoring and helping your team grow.\n\n### About AULA\n\n**Aula is the Learning Experience Platform (LXP) for higher education.** A community-first product that brings together students and educators in a digital environment to interact and collaborate.\n\nAs an organisation we are Remote First and have always been in our engineering team. Our rituals allow us to have a team based all around the world and deliver excellently engineered solutions to complex user problems.\n\n**A fair chance** \nEvery role in the Aula team is open to applications from all sections of society. We believe in the superpowers and potential of everyone; regardless of race, religion or belief, ethnic origin, different physical ability, family structure, socio-economics, age, nationality or citizenship, marital, domestic or civil partnership status, sexual orientation, gender identity, or any other difference that makes you, well, you. \n\nPlease mention the words **SAY VALVE GOOSE** when applying to show you read the job post completely (#RMjE2LjczLjIxNi4xODA=). 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 $90,000 — $140,000/year\n \n\n#Location\nGMT -5 to GMT +3

Interested in designing and building the next generation of Education SaaS? We're looking for a Fullstack Senior Software Developer to join our remote software development team. Join us as we create tools educators and students love!\nYou will join our small team of 9 developers, build and deploy features for a product that is scaling rapidly. Our team's core focus is building a product reliably at scale. You are looking for a role where you can do that in a startup that supports you to grow and develop as we do.\n### TL;DR\n- Full Remote Perm Role > £85,000 - £100,000 ($115,000 - $140,000)\n- User focused SaaS product built in two week sprints in a React, Redux, Node.js, MongoDB, AWS Lambda/serverless environment.\n- Grow as fast as our team does.\nAula is building a community-first product that brings together students and educators in a digital environment to interact and collaborate.\nAs an organisation we are Remote First. Our rituals allow us to have a team based all around the world and deliver excellently engineered solutions to complex user problems. As a Fullstack Software Developer you will work as part of a small product focused team on features and products that help us achieve our mission to enhance the way the world learns.\nTechnically we are a team that makes elegant solutions to large scale learning problems. We work in two week sprints, you architect, build and deploy the product that users enjoy using.\nAula is the Learning Experience Platform (LXP) for higher education.\nWe make it easy for educators to create community-first learning experiences that truly engage students. By combining easy-to-use technology with evidence-informed learning design, we save educators time while better supporting students' success.\nWe're a 35-person fully remote team spread across the globe from Nebraska to Pakistan.\nSolve the most important problems. Work from anywhere.\n**You will**\n- Be a part of a high-performing and inclusive team that values autonomy. - Work with your teammates to set high goals — and celebrate success when we hit them. - Contribute to building a collaborative, productive and friendly remote workplace.\n- Build new features from the ground up as well as improving our existing product.\n- Be user centric: attend user interviews and measure success based on user metrics.\n- Be happy to provide production support, system diagnosis and troubleshooting.\n- Ensure consistency, performance, and reliability across platforms: desktop web, iOS & Android.\n- Commit to high-speed iterations, high code quality, and continuous improvement via agile processes.\n- Work directly with Product Designers and Managers to build, maintain and improve user experience.\n### About the team\nOur Product Development team is made up of designers, engineers and product managers. We work closely with our data team and product support to ensure what we are building is loved.\nWe are a small engineering team who build a complex product with messaging, content editing and assessments used by huge academic institutions.\nOur virtues are what makes Aula as an organisation unique.\nOur commitment to diversity and inclusion should not be mistaken with building an organisation where 8 billion people would thrive. We lean into what makes Aula unique: we're building an organisation where high performing people are silly ambitious about improving education - at scale.\nWe judge our virtues by what we do, not what we say.\nOur virtues are\n🚀 Silly Ambitious\n🔍 Uncomfortably Focused\n🗣 Transparent by Default\n### What you need to do the Job\nThe most important thing about you is that you are curious and care deeply about building great products that affect people's lives. You are transparent, considerate and ready to work hard to further our mission.\nWe're looking for software engineers who care about shaping our users' experience, building and supporting features across the entire stack (more emphasis on the frontend).\n**Must-haves:**\n- 5+ years Engineering experience, ideally across the stack.\n- Experience building products end to end, ideally within a SaaS company.\n- Product mindset. Ability to break down work into deliverables that bring value to users.\n**Nice to have:**\n- Extensive knowledge of: Javascript, React, React Native, Node.js, Mongodb and AWS.\n- Proven track record of working and communicating effectively with Product Managers, Design, Data and Support.\n- Experience with automated testing: unit, integration and e2e.\n- Incident response experience.\n- Practical knowledge of cloud infrastructure management.\nYou approach everything you do proactively and are always looking for ways to improve and innovate. You understand that this is a small team in a startup that is scaling and are excited to contribute to the Aula story.\n### **A fair chance**\nEvery role in the Aula team is open to applications from all sections of society. We believe in the superpowers and potential of everyone; regardless of race, religion or belief, ethnic origin, different physical ability, family structure, socio-economics, age, nationality or citizenship, marital, domestic or civil partnership status, sexual orientation, gender identity, or any other difference that makes you, well, _**you**_.\nMore than just encouraging your application, we're committed to conscious inclusion that (we hope) cultivates an ethos of belonging, connection and shared purpose. It's this philosophy that drives us towards our mission, and we open our doors to those who share these motivations. \n\nPlease mention the words **GARLIC SPREAD TORTOISE** when applying to show you read the job post completely (#RMjE2LjczLjIxNi4xODA=). 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 $115,000 — $140,000/year\n \n\n#Location\nWorldwide

**Radical candor? More like radical gander, right?**\n\nOk, enough goose puns for the moment, but now that we’ve got your attention, allow us to tell you more about this company called GooseChase and why might you want to join us!\n\nYou love an app that makes you smile, right? Well our product is a lot of fun. And even though our origins are that of a humble scavenger hunt app, we’ve now evolved (hatched?) into a super-flexible platform used by millions to create all sorts of experiences! It’s all the best parts of a scavenger hunt, with a delightful twist to keep you coming back for more.\n\nWith all that fun and flexibility, we’ve been growing like crazy. For teachers in the classroom, we’re the new “TV cart”, aka the learning tool that students legitimately look forward to. For today’s workplaces, virtual or otherwise, we help the team connect with each other to the point where they want to come into (or logon) to work. And for local cities and towns, we bring families together in a way that truly builds a sense of community.\n\nBut we’re also unique in that we don’t have any investors and, as a result, are able to put our people before profit. Seriously. We have a profit sharing program specifically for this reason! It also means we grow at the pace we want to and put the time into making this the best possible place to work. When we do something, it’s because it’s the best thing for our team and our customers, no matter what. We’ve actually been fully remote from the very beginning, because we wanted our people to have the flexibility to live wherever and however they wanted!\n\n**So what exactly is this job?**\n\nIf you’re looking for impact & ownership, this is about as good as it gets. You’ll have the opportunity to take lead on our back-end tech stack going forward, charting our technical path, contributing to our product direction and helping shape the team as we grow!\n\nFrom a day to day perspective, you’ll be a core member of our cross-functional product development team, focused on both the game organizer and participant experiences. Within our product team, there are no silos or artificial barriers, meaning you’ll be working closely with other engineers and designers! Whatever will help give our customers the best experience possible!\n\nWe recognize building the best products requires using the best tools, so we empower our engineers through access to the best tools and hardware available to remove barriers and enable fast iterating, robust code deployments.\n\nIn terms of technologies, you’ll be working closely with our front-end engineers as well as developing our API and async task system which:\n\n* Is currently based on Django / TastyPie / Celery, with plans to migrate to a Node.js-based architecture (that’s where you come in!)\n* Stores data in Postgresql, with images & videos in S3\n* Utilizes redis and memcached for caching, session storage, and async task result storage\n* Runs on Linode, switching over shortly to our new kubernetes-based cluster\n* Powers our mobile applications and web-based game manager\n\nLooking at how we work, our methodologies are:\n* Continuous integration using CircleCI to empower developer autonomy and shorten development cycles\n* Agile, with two week sprint cycles\n* Daily async check-ins - stay connected to the team, but without zombie standups\n* Project management in Asana, with our “office” taking place on Slack & Zoom - we have a very strong gif game\n\n**How do you know if this might be for you?**\n\nAt GooseChase you’ll be working alongside a team of highly motivated, world-class engineers with tons of opportunities for learning, growth, and mentorship. Our product team works closely together, so we are extremely selective about who we hire to ensure the calibre of our engineering talent remains high. Be prepared to bring your ‘A’ game!\n\nWe understand that relevant experience comes in all shapes and sizes and the ability to do the job is all that matters. With that in mind, we aren’t going to put together a generic list of all the requirements that we’re looking for with this job, however, there are certain things we are looking for - specifically:\n\n* Have you been able to collaborate & communicate successfully with others in a cross-functional team?\n* Do you have very high standards for your work and desire to work with other talented people?\n* Have you succeeded at architecting and implementing APIs that have been used by lots of people?\n* Are you passionate about full stack development and the web ecosystem?\n* Do you bring a depth of expertise in security and performance best practices?\n* Are you experienced in developing production-grade web systems that are performant and fault-tolerant at scale?\n* Are you based in the GMT-4 to GMT-8 time zones (North America), so you can work closely with our distributed product team?\n* Can you get down with an uncomfortable amount of goose puns?\n\nOk the last one isn’t super work related, but we honestly do have a lot of goose puns. It’s one of our favourite parts of our culture!\n\nWe do things differently here. We’re all about fun, but also making an impact. We care deeply about working with amazing people, and have set up our company culture specifically for that - our compensation is competitive, our work environment is autonomous and collaborative, and our emphasis is on learning and growth. Put simply, it’s the type of company we actually want to work at ourselves!\n\nSo, this is us, standing in front of you, asking you to join us. \n\nPlease mention the words **AWESOME CONGRESS SHIELD** when applying to show you read the job post completely (#RMjE2LjczLjIxNi4xODA=). 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#Benefits\n ⏰ Async\n\n💰 Profit sharing\n\n
\n\n#Location\nNorth America