Lead Software Engineer, Backend, Python

Location: Lexington or Newton MA; flexibility to be partially remote within the Greater Boston area

Pay: $130,000 - $170,000 depending on capabilities. Strong benefits and potential equity.

About Empow Studios

At Empow Studios, we educate children ages 7-15 in coding, engineering, and digital arts with a focus on fun, discovery, and building a life-long passion in STEM. The foundation of our business is TalentBox, our project-based learning learning management system with integrated STEM curriculum. We leverage TalentBox in three lines of business: we license TalentBox to schools and other educational organizations; we provide schools with more complete solutions that bundle TalentBox with our instructors; and we provide complete STEM classes and camps directly to families. We have won more awards for excellence, and offer more programs, in more locations, than any other STEM education provider in Massachusetts.

Recently we have invested heavily in building the leadership team needed to accelerate national expansion of our proven business. Our new owner and CEO brings expertise in education, online learning software, and scaling both for profit and nonprofit organizations including several VC-backed companies that were successfully exited via IPO or private sale. Our new Regional Director, CTO and Director of Marketing all have held senior leadership roles at nationally recognized education or technology companies.

About the Role

As Lead Software Engineer, you will develop TalentBox, our existing project-based learning learning management system. Reporting to the CTO, and in collaboration with product management, you will lead a small team including a frontend engineer, plus QA and design resources through all phases of application development including designing, building, testing, and deploying. This position is ideal for a Python developer with at least 5 years of experience who wants to be largely hands-on, lead a small engineering team, and play a pivotal role in the company’s rapid growth. Imagine how great you’ll feel helping teachers deliver high quality multi-award winning STEM and coding education to thousands of young people!

*The TalentBox roadmap includes: *

• Enable automated, course- and milestone-specific communications to parents that increase their visibility into their child’s projects and learning
• Increase TalentBox’s ability to assess a student’s interim project deliverable and offer useful coaching
  
• Increase TalentBox’s ability to deploy in Chromebook-only environments. (Many of the technologies we teach are PC-based.)
• Improve integrations with website purchasing and backend financial systems
• Implement data lake and analytics to accelerate and improve insights by learning and business teams

Required Skills

• 5+ years of experience building highly available, scalable, secure and performant web applications
  
• Proficient with Python, Django and PostgreSQL (not at the Django ORM level); experienced with the rest of our backend technologies
• Proven ability to write high quality, testable code
• 1+ years of experience leading engineering teams with direct reports; sufficient front end skills to manage a more junior front end engineer
  
• Experience making and implementing build/buy decisions
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills

*BackEnd Technologies (experience required) *

• Development: Python 3, Django, Falcon, (DRF is a plus)
• Database: PostgreSQL, Elasticsearch, Redis, RabbitMQ
• AWS: Security Groups, ALBs, RDS, ElastiCache, ElasticSearch, EC2, S3, SES, SQS
• Other/Operations: Linux, Nginx, Celery; Docker & Docker Compose, Jira, Datadog, Sentry, Gitlab

Additional Front-End Technologies (only enough experience to manage Jnr Front-End Engineer is required)

• Development: JavaScript; Angular 8+, Typescript and CSS frameworks like Sass, Less; RxJs; SCSS; HTML5/CSS3; REST Web Services; Component library framework integration (e.g. Angular Material)
• Other/Operations: Yarn, Git, and Webpack

To Apply

Please send your resume and cover letter to [[email protected]] with “Lead Software Engineer” and your name in the subject line.

Empow Studios is an equal opportunity employer that values diversity of all kinds and encourages candidates from all backgrounds to apply for this exciting new opportunity. Empow Studios is an E-verify Employer.