Lead Front End Engineer

Trala is a tech-powered online music school. We are the fastest growing music school in the world, with over 1000% growth in 2022. Our mission is to make world-class music education accessible to every single person on Earth.

Right now, music education is only accessible to the privileged, rich, and urban. Imagine instead a world where all 4 billion people who will pick up an instrument in the next 30 years could get a world-class education. That is the future we’re obsessed with creating.

At Trala, we’re pushing forward music education in three huge ways:

1. We invented signal processing technology that listens to students play their real instruments and gives instant feedback on every mistake.
2. We wrote the first major method of music instruction geared towards adult learners and the first to prioritize accessibility and diversity.
3. We personally match every student with a teacher to make sure there’s a great fit.

Over the last 6 years, we’ve gotten 600,000+ downloads of our companion app, taught lessons to students in 183 countries, and earned support from great musicians like Joshua Bell. Our students are ages 5 to 90 and live in rural Montana, Lebanon, tiny Pacific islands, Hong Kong, and our hometown of Chicago.

In the next 18 months, we will:

• Grow from teaching 1,500 lessons/month to 10,000 lessons/month.
• Turn our companion app into the best place on earth for musicians to practice.
• Create an initial web presence for our scheduling and subscription tools.
• Build the vast set of internal and backend tools needed to achieve the above.

Requirements

You will architect, build from scratch, and own web applications and their associated backend endpoints. That means working closely with our product manager, our teachers, our sales team, and our students to build both customer facing and internal applications. If you're the type to be just as excited to meet with a student as you are to ship code, then you might be a fit.

Our ideal candidate has:

• 4+ years’ experience building web apps. You’ve either been a lead developer or are ready to take that leap.
• Strong opinions on the right way to build software. We’ll expect to hear them from day 1.
• Passion for continuous learning. Great engineers aren’t born. They’re made.
• And optionally, a music background.

Benefits

Why Trala?

• You’ll make an immediate impact on the team with a high degree of growth potential.
• Trala is funded by amazing people like the CEOs of Reddit, LinkedIn, and Duolingo. They’re betting their dollars on Trala’s team — a team we hope you’ll join.
• Trala prioritizes diversity, inclusion, and righting economic and social wrongs in the world of music. We strive to make our corner of the world a better place.
• Trala deeply impacts peoples’ lives all across the world. These are dreams we are fulfilling. Not “leveraged data monetization” or whatever value Facebook claims to provide these days.

People you would work with:

• Mariah (Lead Android Engineer): Former D1 Athlete at Princeton. Named after Mariah Carey. Spongebob Enthusiast. Believes in the sanctity of Arby’s.
• Matthew (Lead Backend Engineer): Boilermaker. Enjoys golf, video games, and piano. Suspiciously good at poker. Knows dogs are better than cats. Rescues pitbulls. Sometimes builds websites.
• Josh (Lead iOS Engineer): Programmer of things that go “bleep” and “bloop” (and things that could go “bleep” or “bloop” if they really wanted to).
• Vish (CTO): Winner of 4 national hackathons. Has eaten a Death Sandwich and survived.
• Read up on our full team at https://www.trala.com/about.

This is a full-time, US-remote role, though if you happen to be based in Chicago we’d love to invite you to do hybrid work in our West Loop office. Compensation includes salary + medical, dental, and vision benefits + stock options.