Full Stack Software Engineer Coursehorse
New York City, NY

Job Description

About Us

Based in downtown NYC, CourseHorse is the first marketplace that helps people discover & enroll in trusted local classes, ranging from casual programs like cooking & art, to professional courses like finance and programming. We believe that learning is the single greatest way to positively impact individuals & our society, which makes our goal simple: to make lifelong learning easier.

We work with over 2,200 class providers offering 60,000 classes, we've recently launched a nationwide partnership with Groupon, and we're seeking passionate, talented team members to get in on the ground floor & help steer us to the stars.

Job Description

CourseHorse is seeking an extremely talented engineer to help own the full software lifecycle including planning, implementation, and deployment. As a critical member of our small team, you will tackle the complex challenges of scaling architecture while also defining development methodologies and best practices. Our ideal candidate loves to code and build technology that improves peoples' lives.

Responsibilities

* Build and iterate on product features for our students, schools, and admins, analyzing system and business metrics post-release
* Jump between our various stacks and languages and contribute high quality, well-architected code (we write in Ruby, Elixir, PHP, Golang, Javascript)
* You'll be passionate about learning new technologies (and then teaching us about them!)
* Act as a mentor to fellow engineers through code reviews, design document critiques, and brainstorms throughout the software development process
* Collaborate with product managers, designers, and business teams to identify and execute best solutions, focusing on business impact, product polish, and code quality
* Participate in sprint planning, standups and retrospective meetings
* Proactively identifies opportunities to improve code, engineering processes, and systems with effective solutions
* Own the lifecycle of tickets on your plate, from planning to launch, including implementation, testing and measuring

Experience

* 3+ years of full stack software engineering
* Experience with at least one (ideally many) web-application framework (we use Phoenix, Rails, Zend, Cake, and Express)
* Experience with at least one dynamic back end language (having worked with static and/or functional programming is cool too)
* Experience implementing responsive designs with HTML and CSS
* Experience using various database systems (we use MySQL and Redis, mostly)
* You have a bias towards action and jump into situations eager to make things better
* You're a strong communicator and can explain complex technical concepts to designers, support teams, and other stakeholders
* You're authorized to work for any employer in the U.S.
* Nice to have: Experience working with search engine technologies (Solr, Lucene, CloudSearch, or ElasticSearch a plus)
* Nice to have: You've scaled cloud based infrastructure and deployment automation (AWS / Elastic Beanstalk a plus)

How to know if CourseHorse is a good fit:

* You're looking for more than just a job - you have a desire to help build something real
* You want to get in at the beginning, build from the ground up
* You want ownership over what you produce
* You're naturally curious and love learning
* You're willing to help out as needed, regardless of role or title
* You like to move fast and are comfortable with failure
* You enjoy and know how to get stuff done in a rapidly changing environment
* You want to be friends with the people you work with
* You like fun (sometimes fabulously witty) environments, and want to work in downtown NYC

Compensation / Perks

* Competitive salary & stock options
* Monthly class scholarship
* Powerful hardware/software support
* Flexible vacation (and yes, we all actually use it!)

Please include answers to the following questions in your cover letter:

You have just released a major feature to the website; shortly after the deploy completes you get a message from the CEO saying the site is down. You visit the frontpage and get a 500 error. Uh oh. What questions would you begin to ask? How would you begin to handle the issue to find out where the failure is happening? You don't have to go in depth, just give us an idea of how you would respond to this issue and some top areas you'd start looking (or the questions you'd start asking).

Please include a link to your favorite animated gif