Platform Engineer, CommonLit
AWS, Rails
$95-150k
Literacy eLearning platform
Be an early applicant
Literacy eLearning platform
101-200 employees
Be an early applicant
$95-150k
101-200 employees
Company mission
To close the opportunity gap in literacy instruction and ensure that all students have the reading, writing, communication, and collaboration skills needed to unlock their potential.
Role
Who you are
- Regardless of the time zone in which they reside, the Platform Engineer must be available to work 11 am-5 pm EST with work hours surrounding
- Candidates must have 3+ years experience operating production applications at some meaningful level of scale in AWS infrastructure
- Experience in software development, including some time on a Ruby on Rails application. You will need to be able to understand behavior at the interface point of our applications and our infrastructure
- Strong knowledge of core AWS services: VPC, IAM, S3, Secrets Manager, CloudFormation
- Experience operating and troubleshooting Postgres databases
- A desire to make things organized and understandable by others. Part of this role is making infrastructure and tooling more accessible to other engineers
- Excellent problem-solving skills
- Attention to detail and organizational inclination
- Excellent time-management skills
- Strong interpersonal and problem-solving skills
- Strong communication and collaboration skills
- This role involves prolonged periods in a stationary position at a desk and working on a computer
What the job involves
- Our small (ten-member) engineering team works in a collaborative, high-trust environment where we ship high-quality software that delivers CommonLit's curriculum, helping students grow to become lifelong readers
- As a Platform Engineer, you'll amplify our team's impact through work on our infrastructure, tooling, and security
- Your work will include long-term projects to improve and optimize our infrastructure as well as responsive work to fix infrastructure and tool issues that block application engineers
- You'll improve our tools, making it easier to ship reliable software more quickly. You will work closely with the CTO, who has been involved in infrastructure and tooling for the team
- We run a Ruby on Rails monolith with a few small extracted services. We deploy our applications on AWS EKS through Northflank PaaS. We use Postgres and Redshift as our data stores. Our CI/CD pipelines run on AWS with Buildkite
- Other significant technologies/services in our tech stack include Sidekiq, Redis, Redshift, and Cloudflare. CommonLit is SOC2 compliant and keeping our infrastructure and student data secure is an important priority
- Our team is a group of life-long learners. We value sharing ideas, collaboration, and building performant, reliable software that teachers can rely on in the high-stress classroom environment
- Monitor and operate CommonLit’s AWS infrastructure
- Work with the CTO to maintain and optimize CommonLit's infrastructure and application environment
- Develop and improve CommonLit's developer tooling to enable engineers to do their best work
- Collaborate with engineers to find pain points and remove them. Unblock engineers when tooling issues arise
- Assist the Data Science team with data pipelines and ETL processes to improve reliability and efficiency
- Lead efforts to improve security at the infrastructure level
- Monitor compliance-related items associated with infrastructure
- Assist the CTO with cost-optimization to maximize CommonLit's non-personnel tech spend
- This role involves prolonged periods in a stationary position at a desk and working on a computer
Application process
- Apply by: Monday, March 23 at 5 pm ET
- Interviewing is a demand on your time. Here's what you can expect from our interview process:
- A call with our talent team to talk about your experience and learn about CommonLit
- A 45-60 minute technical interview over Zoom with an engineer
- A 2-3 hour final interview that will include pairing on problems with CommonLit team members and meeting our engineers and product managers
- This job includes a background check and ongoing verification of your US residency
Our take
The US Department of Education has reported that over 50% of US adults over the age of 16 lack proficiency in literacy. This figure is remarkable, and with educators still struggling to fill gaps in education, many fear it will rise. So CommonLit’s tailored literacy lessons may prove more critical than ever.
CommonLit is a non-profit edtech platform that provides research based reading lessons and resources for all literacy levels, grades 3-12. The curriculum is in use by over 20 million registered teachers and students worldwide, and 88,000 schools in the US alone - the majority of them low-income. It’s localizing many of its materials into Spanish too, to tap into the substantial Latin-American markets.
This kind of global reach and deep market penetration is a real coup for the business, especially given the highly competitive nature of the US edtech scene. Lalilo, OgStar Reading, and Simbi are among the many for-profit edtech startups looking to address the same issue, but they will struggle to compete with CommonLit's comprehensive free offering. Plus, CommonLit's non-profit status could mean it’s less vulnerable to the looming threat of the edTech bubble bursting. New products such as a Chat GPT detector for teachers exemplifies how CommonLit is keeping its finger on the pulse so as to maintain relevancy.
Steph
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Insights
51% employee growth in 12 months
Company
Funding (2 rounds)
Oct 2018
$3.5m
GRANT
Oct 2016
$3.9m
GRANT
Total funding: $7.4m
Company benefits
- Health
- Dental
- Vision
- 401K
- Commuter benefits
- Company holidays
- Parental leave
- Sick leave
- Personal leave
Company HQ
Capitol Hill, Washington, DC
Leadership
Michelle Brown
(CEO)Graduated with a Master's in Education from Harvard, and subsequently spent time as a middle school reading and languages teacher.
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