Formative is looking for an experienced Senior Full Stack Engineer to join our awesome team of developers. Are you interested in an amazing opportunity that also makes a difference?

Are you right for our team?

Our web-app, Formative (formative.com), is used by 50K+ teachers and 1M+ students every week, helping teachers see student responses in real-time for immediate feedback and tracking growth to learning standards.

To do this, we have a modern javascript stack (Typescript, React, GraphQL, Apollo Client, webpack, mongoDB, Kubernetes, etc).

If you are great with Javascript and want to help teachers and students, that's all we require. The position is work-from-home, so we are looking for responsible, self-starters who want to join an amazing team of 10+ full-stack developers.

Our technical interview is just one hour of pair-programming, where we use a similar open source stack and see what it's like to work together.

We want you to be opinionated, factual, but willing to compromise. You should be comfortable both giving and receiving feedback from peers. We want to make each other better.

You will play a key role in carving out a future for our web application and for the future of education. We currently have a team of brilliant developers from whom you can learn from and grow alongside.

With your input, help and expertise we will build an application that will ultimately collect more classroom data on student learning than any in human history. We want to use that data to help teachers, schools, parents, students and entire communities have unprecedented academic growth.

Responsibilities:

• Develop visually appealing front end website architecture, including translating designer mock-ups and wireframes into front-end code
• Develop functional databases, applications, and servers to support websites on the back end
• Ensure cross-platform optimization for mobile devices
• Stay abreast of developments in web applications and programming languages
• Strategize organizational direction on emerging technology platforms and communicate the effectiveness to stakeholders
• Stay current and provide insight on cutting edge software approaches, architectures, and vendors
• Ensure that non-functional requirements such as security, performance, maintainability, scalability, usability, and reliability are being considered when architecting solutions
• Keep job knowledge up-to-date by studying new development tools, programming techniques, and computing equipment; participating in educational opportunities; reading professional publications; maintaining personal and professional networks; participating in professional organizations

Requirements:

• 3+ years of full-stack paid software development experience
• Associate’s Degree or higher in Computer Science or related field or equivalent work experience
• Expert in JavaScript (Typescript preferred)
• Experienced in front-end web development using React or a similar framework (React preferred)
• Experience developing web application backends using node.js
• Ability to work from your home office during normal EST, CST or PST hours

Bonus Points If:

• You've built apps already using React, Typescript,GraphQL
• GraphQL makes you smile
• You have implemented E2E tests on a continuous integration server
• You have implemented real-time reactivity in a project using WebSockets
• You've written complex aggregate queries on MongoDB and/or BigQuery
• You like board games

What’s the Formative story?

Our co-founder, Craig Jones, was a middle school science teacher at a struggling public school in South Los Angeles. Thanks to a school grant, he was able to work with a class set of used laptops every day. Initially, Craig patched together some basic software, a student response system and a lot of spreadsheets to help understand his students' strengths and weaknesses to learning standards. The technique of daily formative assessment, more targeted intervention, and faster feedback ultimately led to record-breaking academic outcomes.

After four years in the classroom, Craig went to grad school at UCLA where he met Kevin McFarland, his roommate, and soon-to-be co-founder. Together, Kevin and Craig envisioned a world where faster formative teaching practices could replace traditional end-of-year summative assessments. After multiple research initiatives, prototypes, and the help of countless individuals, Formative (goformative.com) was launched in January 2015.

Today, teachers from over 10,000 school districts across the US and the world have signed up for Formative, driving thousands of learning institutions to upgrade to more powerful partner status. When surveyed, 90% of teachers reported that they believe using Formative improved student achievement, and 97% of students report more confidence in their understanding of the material. We are on a mission to bring this transformative learning approach to more teachers and students and to contribute to a stronger education system. Are you interested in making a big difference for teachers and students? Join us!

Benefits

Work with a rapidly growing and amazing team passionate about making a difference for teachers and education!
Remote position within the US or with US compatible working hours.
The following benefits apply to full-time employees based in the US.

• Health, dental and vision insurance
• Health Savings Account and Flexible Spending Account
• Generous 401k Company Match
• Company stock ownership
• Flexible Paid Time Off
• Paid Parental Leave
• Paid Holidays
• We are not able to provide sponsorship (H-1B visa, etc.) for employment at Formative.

Formative is committed to creating a diverse environment and is proud to be an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, gender, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, national origin, genetics, disability, age, or veteran status.