About Niche
Niche is the leader in school search. Our mission is to make researching and enrolling in schools easy, transparent, and free. With in-depth profiles on every school and college in America, 140 million reviews and ratings, and powerful search tools, we help millions of people find the right school for them. We also help thousands of schools recruit more best-fit students, by highlighting what makes them great and making it easier to visit and apply.
Niche is all about finding where you belong, and that mission inspires how we operate every day. We want Niche to be a place where people truly enjoy working and can thrive professionally.
About the Role
We're looking for a driven, resourceful, and systematic Software Engineer to join our growing team. As a Back End Software Engineer, you will be tasked with building and enhancing services in our distributed systems, with a strong focus on reliability, maintainability, and scalability. Our microservices platform is built on Go, Postgresql, Kafka, Elasticsearch and more.
What You Will Do
During the 1st Month:
- Attend onboarding sessions to better understand our internal processes and learn about the company
- Join a product team and begin working within an Agile development framework
- Collaborate with product team members to implement and ship new features or functionality
- Meet with various team members to learn how your role fits within the team, the tech department, and Niche
- Shadow Back End team members to learn more about our tech stack, the products we support, and our development standards and processes
Within 3 Months:
- Participate in code reviews and provide thoughtful, constructive feedback to other Back End team members
- Gain exposure to the platform's underlying infrastructure and deployment processes
- Contribute to onboarding documentation for future hires
Within 6 Months:
- Work with members of the tech and product teams to distill user stories or business requirements into technical requirements/design
- Understand the high level architecture of the website, mobile app, and other consumers of our back-end services
Within 12 months:
- Confidently implement new functionality and fix bugs across a variety of Back End projects
- Begin identifying areas for improvement in our codebase, researching best practices, and making recommendations to the team on strategies to address them
- Solidify understanding of the breadth of our tech stack, including underlying infrastructure, front end applications, and internal tools, and how they interact with our back-end services.
What We Are Looking For:
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, a related field, or equivalent experience
- 2-3+ years of professional experience
- Experience with one or more general purpose programming languages (Go, C/C++, C#, Java, Python etc.)
- Experience with one or more SQL databases (Postgresql, SQL Server etc.)
- Strong understanding of common data structures and algorithms
- Basic understanding of networking protocols
- Working knowledge of Git
- Strong collaboration and communication skills, both verbal and written
Why Niche?
- Full time, salaried position with competitive compensation
- Comprehensive health plan, including vision and dental, provided at no cost to the employee
- 20 PTO days, 10 Paid Holidays and 3 Volunteer Days Off per year
- Parental leave
- Stock options and 401(k) with employer match
- Your ideas and work will make an immediate impact on our company and millions of users
Niche will only employ those who are legally authorized to work in the United States without sponsorship now or in the future for this opening.
Candidates only. No recruiters or agencies, please. All of our open positions are located in our Pittsburgh, PA office and we are also open to remote candidates. Sorry, we do not offer relocation assistance.
Niche is an equal opportunity employer committed to fostering an inclusive, innovative environment with the best employees. Therefore, we provide employment opportunities without regard to age, race, color, ancestry, national origin, religion, disability, sex, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, or any other protected status in accordance with applicable law.
If there are preparations we can make to help ensure you have a comfortable and positive interview experience, please let us know.