Our mission is to take cars off the road by making it safe and easy to vanpool in the post Covid world.

A vanpool is a group of people who commute together, usually in a shared van. It’s an excellent, cost effective way to commute, used by hundreds of thousands of Americans, but the industry is largely offline. It’s difficult to find, join, and start vanpools.

We build software that fixes this, making vanpooling simple and flexible. We believe that in a post Covid world, it will be more important than ever to rethink shared transportation and make it more adaptive.

Our customers are organizations like transit agencies and employers who have existing vanpool fleets. We provide these customers with our SaaS platform that manages their vanpool programs. We capture real time information about open seats, then make those seats available to book through our app. We also make it easy for people to crowdsource and start new vanpools.

About MagicBus, Inc.

MagicBus is on a mission to transform the way people commute and take cars off the road by making it safe and convenient to use shared transportation rather than driving alone. Specifically, we focus on improving the efficiency and accessibility of vanpools, in particular for essential and blue-collar workers with 30+ min commutes and without convenient public transportation alternatives.

What are we up to?

Over the past two years, we’ve already served more than 10,000 riders from over 150 organizations with a pilot product. We raised a Series-A funding round in November 2019 and since then are focused on building the next iteration of a delightful product. As we exit out of this pandemic in 2021 and the masses start commuting back to the office again, we are scaling our sales and marketing to acquire more riders in our launch cities.

About the role

We’re seeking a dynamic backend engineer summer intern to join our product engineering team. In this role, you will report directly to the CTO. Ideally, you are a quick learner, entrepreneurial, a creative problem solver, and can do things independently while dealing with ambiguity.

You will be responsible for working with the rest of the team to maintain and grow features in the backend code base. This work will range from supporting GraphQL queries for our various webapps to consume, to writing SQL queries, to integrating mapping and payments libraries such as Mapbox and Stripe.

This is full-time summer internship position (40 hours per week), and we have flexibility on the start and end dates, but the internship must last at least 10 weeks.

Responsibilities

• Build robust and scalable backend code using Python and Postgres
• Collaborate with the product team in an agile environment to break down requirements, plan and estimate tasks.
• Drive quality by writing effective unit, integration and functional tests for high availability systems and libraries.
• Effectively collaborate with Product, Design, Operations, and other internal groups (both technical and non-technical).

Prior Qualifications

Required

• Pursuing Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science or Related Degree
• Strong grasp of Python fundamentals
• Strong understanding of client/server applications, i.e. Flask (REST), GraphQL
• Excellent verbal & written communication skills, i.e. talking through technical problems and interacting on Github/Gitlab with team mates

Preferred

• Experience writing relational database queries, i.e. PostgreSQL
• Experience with mapping libraries, i.e. Google Maps APIs, Mapbox, OSRM
• Passion or interest in transportation is a huge plus!

We're working on problems related to geospatial route optimization, machine learning, and natural language processing in addition to mobile web and app development.