UPchieve is an edtech nonprofit that provides free, 24/7 online tutoring and college counseling to low-income high school students in the U.S. Using our app, students can request and get paired with a live, volunteer tutor in under 5 minutes. Our mission is to democratize access to academic support so that all students, regardless of income, have an equal opportunity to finish high school, attend college, and achieve upward mobility. So far, we’ve matched over 50K on-demand tutoring requests from 10K+ students across all 50 states. Our work has also been recognized by Forbes and TIME, and our funders include both Y Combinator and the Gates Foundation. 

PLEASE APPLY HERE: https://upchieve.welcomekit.co/jobs/senior-engineer_brooklyn

About

About UPchieve

UPchieve is an edtech nonprofit that provides free, 24/7 online tutoring and college counseling to low-income high school students in the U.S. Using our app, students can request and get paired with a live, volunteer tutor in under 5 minutes. Our mission is to democratize access to academic support so that all students have an equal opportunity to finish high school, attend college, and achieve upward mobility. So far, we’ve matched 75,000+ on-demand tutoring requests from 20,000+ students across all 50 states. Our work has also been recognized by Forbes and TIME, and our funders include both Y Combinator and the Gates Foundation.

Who we’re looking for

We’re a small team taking on the monumental challenge of democratizing access to academic support. That means we need team members who are excited by autonomy and willing to work on projects outside the scope of their job description if needed. Regardless of role, we also look for candidates who have a personal connection to our cause or a demonstrable interest in education or serving low-income populations.

About Our Team & Office

• We’re a remote-first team located across the U.S.
• We highly value diversity of experiences and perspectives. 2/3 of the team are people of color, and many of us have personal experience growing up low-income or navigating nontraditional educational pathways
• We believe working full-time means 40 hours/week. Non-work stuff is important too!

Our Benefits

• 3 weeks paid vacation AND 3 weeks of paid holidays (including all days between Christmas Eve and New Year’s Day)
• Flexible work schedule (choose your own hours)
• $1,000 annual professional development budget (learning and self-improvement is a huge part of our work culture!)
• Up to 100% covered health insurance for you and your family
• Half-day Fridays during summer

Job Description

About the role

UPchieve is looking for an experienced engineer to join our team. In this role, you’ll work with our product & engineering team (which includes other engineers, a product lead, and a product designer) and our business teams to build the world’s best tutoring platform for low-income students. Given our early stage, you’ll have the opportunity to influence all aspects of our organization, from technical and product strategy to team culture. You’ll play a key role in helping us accomplish our 2030 goal of scaling free tutoring to all 8 million low-income high school students in the U.S.

This might be the right job for you if…

• You’re scrappy and entrepreneurial. If you don’t know how to do something, you’ll find someone to ask or read The Internet™ until you can

• You’re excited by the challenge of building a platform on par with other successful consumer-facing educational platforms like Khan Academy and Duolingo

• You are a team player who sees genuine value in helping other engineers improve their skills

• You’re opinionated AND open-minded. You relish having conversations about architecture and technical trade-offs with other engineers

• You have high quality standards and take pride in a clean and well organized code base

• You think critically about everything you do and aren’t afraid to ask questions

What you’ll do

• Design and build new features
• Proactively review other team members’ code, leaving thoughtful and constructive feedback that helps them improve
• Define standards to ensure high levels of performance, scalability, and reliability of our platform
• Improve our internal workflow to help everyone ship code faster
• Think critically about our product and business, ask questions, and suggest changes

Preferred Experience

We’re looking for someone who...

• Has 5+ years of full-stack app development and demonstrable proficiency with JavaScript/TypeScript
• Has been a member of multiple different engineering teams and seen various development processes in play
• (Bonus) Has prior experience with our tech stack: Node.js, React Native, Vue.js, WebSockets, TypeScript, PostgreSQL
• (Bonus) Has prior experience with devops, people management, and/or QA
• (Bonus) Is interested in open source

Interview Process

Our process: Screening call (~30 mins) → Project (max 3 hours) → Interviews (~3 hours) → (Optional) Team meet-and-greet → Reference checks & offer!

Note that it can take us a few weeks from when you submit your application to invite you to a screening call. Unfortunately, we can typically only bring the top ~15 candidates forward to screening calls (which for some roles may work out to < 10% of applicants).

Our tech stack:

• Vue
• Websockets
• Node.js and TypeScript
• MongoDB
• Azure Cloud and Kubernetes

Our most fun technical challenge we're solving is how to efficiently manage the "marketplace" of students and volunteer coaches and how to most efficiently pair them.