About the job
FlatWorld’s Director of Engineering heads our technology team and helps us excel as a digital publisher. We create award-winning college textbooks for our professors, build online and offline systems to help them teach, and then offer all of this at a fair price to students. Our work depends on the Director of Engineering to lead, learn from, and expand our engineering team, to collaborate with and guide other managers on technical and product decisions, and to be a part of establishing our long-term software strategy.
About the team
Our engineers build, improve, and support a variety of new and existing services using TypeScript, Ruby, JavaScript, and Python. The applications we run support tens of thousands of students each semester and college teachers throughout the United States and Canada. To keep our code high-quality, available, and malleable we automate our Kubernetes-based infrastructure on AWS, we write tests, and we retire/refactor old services and components as often as we build new ones.
We are a small, remote team that is distributed throughout the US. We have been doing remote work effectively for years (including before the pandemic).
In particular we try to:
- Support each other through peer reviews and frequent collaboration
- Treat each other as adults
- Prioritize clearly and update priorities together rather than relying on lots of top-down structure
- Learn new skills and approaches to keep up with the growing needs of our colleagues
The company depends on us to be successful and we take this mandate seriously.
About you
You will be a good fit for this job if you have experience leading teams that build for the web using modern frameworks and infrastructure. Our applications are varied, so you should be comfortable with the entire software development lifecycle (both building new code and maintaining older applications).
We expect our Director of Engineering to be adept at managing people and to enjoy helping others do great work. You will be more effective if you can guide rather than prescribe, or can help a colleague figure out good architectural decisions on their own rather than dictating.
You will not write production code everyday, but you should have submitted a small pull request or reviewed someone else’s pull request in the last week. You have ultimate responsibility for the availability and quality of our websites, applications, and systems.
You should be:
- Excellent at understanding and explaining complex technical topics and tradeoffs
- An expert at some (but not all) of the technologies and infrastructure we use
- Familiar with working remotely
- Helpful, respectful, and inquisitive
- Able to hire, retain, and lead a team of talented engineers
- Experienced with “build versus buy” decisions and capable of extending our skills with outside help
We welcome women, men, and people of all genders who have come to software engineering through nontraditional paths.
About the company
FlatWorld publishes high-quality college textbooks (more than 130) at prices students can actually afford. Our business has thrived by supporting both teachers and students for more than a decade, but our management sees even bigger opportunities to make an impact in higher education.
FlatWorld embraces diversity and equal opportunity in a serious way. We are committed to building teams that represent a variety of backgrounds, perspectives, and skills. The more inclusive we are, the better our work will be.
Our requirements
- At least 6 years of experience with professional software development for the web
- At least 3 years of experience leading or managing high-performing software teams
- Fluency with modern dynamic programming languages like TypeScript, Ruby, JavaScript, or Python
- Experience with AWS, Google Cloud, or Azure
- Experience working in a rapid release cycle and collaborating with colleagues across the organization
- An ability to work in the US for a US employer
- Experience with distributed teams (especially leading them)
Our process
Please send your resume and a short cover letter to jobs@flatworld.com. Our hiring process, while dependent on everyone’s schedules, should take no more than 2–3 weeks in total from resume submission to extending an offer, and typically follows these steps:
We try to be flexible and to be respectful of your time.