Senior Software Engineer, Curiosity Media

IXL Learning, a leading edtech company with products used by 14 million students worldwide, is seeking a Senior Software Engineer who has a passion for technology and language learning to join our Curiosity Media team. 

Curiosity Media is on a mission to teach the world Spanish and English for free. Our flagship product, SpanishDictionary.com, is the world’s largest Spanish learning product. Each year more than 100 million people learn and improve their Spanish on our website and apps. We’ve built the Internet’s most comprehensive database of Spanish and English translations, conjugations, example sentences, pronunciations, synonyms, and antonyms. We combine our extensive reference resources with interactive vocabulary quizzes, conjugation drills, and native-speaker video lessons to provide an unparalleled one-stop shop for students and adult Spanish learners. We also proudly offer all of SpanishDictionary.com’s features on inglés.com, an emerging product in the English learning space. Now we’re on a mission to enhance our interactive learning features and provide our users with a path to fluency. 

This is a full-time remote position for candidates in the United States, strong preference for those in the Eastern time zone. #li-remote #LI-FA1

WHAT YOU'LL BE DOING

• Building interactive learning features to help SpanishDictionary.com become the primary learning product for Spanish-English learners
• Improving the performance and reliability of high-profile features
• Collaborating with your team to shape the technical requirements of new initiatives
• Full stack web development using technologies like TypeScript, Node.js, React, SQL, AWS, and Docker

WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR

• BA/BS or advanced degree in Computer Science or a related discipline
• Thoughtful problem-solving: You can decompose complex problems and work towards a clean and practical solution, by yourself or with teammates. You know what resources to use when you have questions, and you know when to ask for help when you get stuck
• Shipping quality user interfaces: You can work with others to build and maintain quality user interfaces for a big audience, using Web technologies like HTML, CSS, JavaScript, TypeScript, and React
• Familiarity with the backend: You understand all levels of the stack and understand how they work together. Candidates should have experience building APIs and data models and working with SQL. Node.js Familiarity with AWS is a bonus
• Put users first: You think critically about the implications of what you're building, and how it shapes our Spanish and English learners
• Empathetic communication: You communicate nuanced ideas clearly, whether you are explaining technical decisions in writing or brainstorming in real time. In disagreements, you engage thoughtfully with other perspectives and compromise when needed
• Team player: You understand when work is better, together. You enjoy collaborating cross-functionally to accomplish shared goals, and you care about learning, growing, and helping others to do the same

WHAT TYPES OF PROJECTS DO WE WORK ON?

• We developed a pipeline for authoring pronunciations, recording videos, and displaying them on the website using React, AWS Lambda, and AWS S3
• We built conjugation drills that provide unlimited Spanish conjugation practice for every verb in every tense using React, Node.js, and MySQL
• We built our own classroom learning management system, which allows teachers to assign lessons and track student progress
• We built SpanishDictioinary.com Premium, which offers exclusive content to tens of thousands of our most dedicated learners
• We deploy a high-availability, automated, and scalable server infrastructure on AWS with an uptime of more than 99.999%

WHAT’S THE CULTURE LIKE?

• We’ve brought together a talented team that is down-to-earth, friendly, and driven to build products that people use and love
• Our technology stack is state-of-the-art, and we pride ourselves on an engineering culture committed to data-informed decisions, focus on value, rapid iteration, broad test coverage, extensive automation, peer-reviewed code, and fast deployments
• Software drives our business, and we understand the value of having time for engineers to focus on technical priorities
• Curiosity Media is a division of IXL learning. We have a small team dedicated to Spa