Lead Engineer - Panorama Education

Panorama is on a mission to radically improve student outcomes by helping educators measure, understand, and act on data and feedback.Thousands of schools, serving millions of students, use the Panorama Platform as an important tool for improving education through data: from helping teachers hone their practice, to engaging with families, to building school culture, and beyond.

About our product and engineering challenges: Imagine you’re the guidance counselor for 500 students in a large urban high school, trying to identify which students are struggling so much that they will stop coming to school. Or, you’re a principal who wants to identify, through your data, what your best teachers are doing differently to engage their students. Or, you’re a superintendent who believes in the importance of grit, growth mindset and other character skills in addition to Math and English test scores. Or, you’re a teacher who wants a simple intervention to build better relationships with students. At Panorama, we’re building the trusted, unified tool that all educators reach for when they want to understand, reflect on, and improve their students’ outcomes. To do this, our engineers are solving hard technical challenges in K-12 education:

• building out real-time data pipelines of a student’s important day-to-day events into our platform, including the quantifiable and qualitative elements of a student’s experience
• measuring data across the country’s largest urban schools, including optical mark recognition over millions of paper surveys
• designing a highly available online platform that calculates realtime analytics across billions data points
• refining our product’s user experience so that this firehose of data is truly useful, actionable information (as opposed to yet another data dashboard)
• integrating the latest educational research and data science tools into our platform, so that our clients have access to the best techniques that they can use to change outcomes for students

About our engineering team: As an engineering team, we value learning and challenging ourselves (one of our core values is “be humble”). From lunchtime guest talks and weekly book clubs to hackathons and open-source projects (both in the office and outside it), we are always looking to improve (just as any great student would). We emphasize team collaboration across disciplines, and we iterate with quick cycles and lots of feedback.

You will be successful here if you love to:

• Take on a big, ambiguous product challenge, learn deeply about how we can best solve it, and collaborate with your team to meet the challenge head on.
• Teach other engineers the tools, tricks, and techniques you’ve mastered, and be excited to learn with your teammates to master more.
• Lead and collaborate across engineering to discover best technical practices and lessons learned from successful and unsuccessful projects.
• Design, prototype, write, test, refactor, review, debug, deploy, monitor, and occasionally be frustrated by code every day.

You’d make a great candidate if you bring:

• 8+ years of engineering experience, including 3+ years in web app development experience in high-performing, fast-paced, growing teams. You’ve seen products and systems launch to spectacular failure and to great success -- and maybe you even have seen your products change the lives of people for the better.
• Fluency in multiple languages and frameworks. (We primarily use Ruby on Rails plus JavaScript with AngularJS, but it’s okay if you haven’t, as long as you’ve learned similar languages in the past.)
• Great communication, collaboration, and leadership skills. We’re looking for great teammates who will be the go-to advisors and teachers for engineers and non-engineers alike.