eSpark at a Glance

Our vision is that every student, regardless of their circumstances or background, has the opportunity to set and realize an ambitious dream for themselves. Our mission is to re-imagine learning so it's student centered, enabling students to succeed in school and life.

In the last school year, more than 1M students used eSpark, many of them for the first time. Our customer satisfaction (measured by net promoter score) has grown steadily and is now 79.  We’re on track to triple our new bookings this year, and our Technology team is looking to double by the end of 2022.

If this sounds like an exciting opportunity, and you’re eager to hear more, we look forward to talking with you!

Fullstack Software Engineer

As a Fullstack Software Engineer, you’ll both join our Technology organization, reporting to the Director of Engineering, to continue to grow and develop your skills and experience as an engineer; and become a member of a cross-functional product team, to make the lives of teachers, students, principals, and other eSparkers better by designing, implementing, and shipping high-quality software.

We believe that there are five keys to success at eSpark: an excitement to learn, a readiness to work collaboratively, good technical fundamentals, a passion for building things people love, and a desire to think and act like a business owner (because we are!). Currently we are seeking candidates with experience in at least Elm or Ruby on Rails to have a quick impact on the team – the applications our students and teachers use are built with Elm and Typescript on the frontend and Ruby on Rails on the backend, running on top of Docker and with data stored in MySQL and Redshift. Our code is covered with automated tests run via Gitlab, and regularly deployed via Convox, sitting on top of AWS. That said, these are the tools we use today – we are not dogmatic about our tech stack, and we gladly use the tools that help us build great products that scale, whatever they might be.

As a Fullstack Software Engineer, you’ll focus on three areas:

Technology

• Participate in the design and implementation of both new features and incremental changes across our technology stack that are impactful, scalable, and maintainable
• Refactor new and existing features in response to user feedback and metrics
• Support the effort to pay down technical debt, create new internal tools, and make for happier developer experiences
• Work closely with design and product to define, refine, and scope product opportunities, and engage directly with real users as needed
• Identify and prioritize ways of making our product more resilient in low-bandwidth environments (which often affect low-income or rural users)
• Improve how we adapt each student’s learning needs and styles dynamically to keep them on track
• Build better tools for teachers to measure outcomes for small groups or one-on-one tutoring to help students where most needed
• Scope and create ways to inform and engage parents in their students’ learning at the right moments (and without requiring significant time commitments parents might not be able to make) 

Team 

• Be a positive role model by helping create a safe and inclusive team environment
• Provide perspective on team practices to aid in continuous improvement
• Surface and address, where appropriate, obstacles proactively so the team maintains a predictable and sustainable pace
• Help peers grow as engineers through practices like documentation, code review, and team presentations
• Participate in sourcing and interviewing candidates to grow a talented, collaborative, ego-free team

Strategy 

• Participate in collaborative, sound technical decision-making by engineers in the organization
• Contribute to team discussion and creation of objectives, metrics, and execution strategies 
• Tell the “story” of the engineering team, connecting its work to the larger mission of the company
• Understand how technology reflects and amplifies biases and power structures to guide decisions so that our products are safe and equitable for our students and teachers

In addition to a competitive salary and stock options, eSpark offers full healthcare coverage (including vision, dental, and mental health benefits), generous vacation and parental leave policies. We are a fully-distributed company (circa March 2020) and provide benefits around outfitting your home-office arrangement, including your choice of technical equipment. We believe in work-life balance and respect nights and weekends.

About eSpark

Vision. Our vision is that every student, regardless of their circumstances or background, has the opportunity to set and realize an ambitious dream for themselves. Our mission is to re-imagine learning so it's student centered, enabling students to succeed in school and life.

Impact.  Our work makes a significant difference in students' lives. Independent testing data from public school districts across the country consistently show that students learn more in areas of personalized study with eSpark. One researcher from MIT, who evaluated an eSpark in Boston Public Schools, wrote:  “I find strong positive, significant effects of eSpark for both math and English Language Arts (ELA).  So the eSpark intervention, which is just 30 minutes a day, led to almost half the effect of a full year in a high performing charter school.  I view these as very impressive gains.  The findings made a substantial dent into the black-white achievement gap.” 

Diversity. At eSpark, we believe all people—adults and students alike—deserve respect for who they are. We work hard to make eSpark an environment in which everyone can thrive and succeed, supporting employees as individuals through people-centric management and as a company with our IDEA (Inclusion, Diversity, Equity, and Access) employee resource group. Representation is of profound importance to us, as we believe that it’s critical that our team reflects the student populations we aim to serve.

Growth.  In the last school year, more than 850,000 students used eSpark, many of them for the first time. Our customer satisfaction (measured by net promoter score) has grown steadily and is now 79.  We’re on track to triple our new bookings this year. We are looking to increase the team size this year, and double it next year.

Pandemic. The 2020-20201 school year was a time of unprecedented challenges for teachers, students, parents, and schools, and it looks like this year won’t be better. 

We believe —and have seen in the last year— that eSpark’s personalized curriculum, made of fun and educational games and videos and adapted to each student; our commitment to providing teachers the tools and live support they need to support both remote and in-person learning; and our engaged team focused together on supporting educators and learners, can be a powerful aid to teachers and to the students most at risk of falling behind during the pandemic.