Senior Backend Engineer (US or Toronto Remote)

HOMER has a newly created opportunity for a Senior Backend Engineer to join our growing team! This role will be remotely based in Toronto, Ontario or in select US locations.

HOMER, a BEGiN brand, is the proven early learning program that provides the best educational start possible. We offer personalized, fun, and proven learning products for kids ages 2-8 to help build confidence, mastery, and a love of learning. We are deeply committed to our members and to their children, and we are building a creative and strategic team to develop a portfolio of early learning products that support learning everywhere.

Reporting to our Content Engineering Manager, the Senior Engineer, Backend / Fullstack will primarily contribute to the software design and development of our content management and delivery systems among other related tools and services. As a member of the Content Engineering team, you will often serve as a technical liaison between our content creators (designers, animators, and learning specialists) and client-side engineers that build our portfolio of applications.

You will:

• Make direct technical contributions (writing, debugging, reviewing and deploying code).
• Provide technical guidance and feedback to your team members on a team distributed in several time-zones using agile project management methodologies.
• Contribute to technical design and architecture of applications, and participate in larger system design efforts.
• Build automated tests and help maintain existing test-suites.

Must Haves:

• Demonstrable expertise designing and building full-stack NodeJS services and complex frontend applications.
• Experience bundling frontend applications with technologies like Webpack
• Familiarity with headless Content Management Systems, such as Squidex.io
• Sound Computer Science fundamentals (Bachelor’s degree in CS or related field preferred).
• Strong interpersonal and communication skills.
• At least 5 years of relevant work experience (or undergraduate degree in Computer Science and 3 years of relevant work experience).

Nice-to-Haves:

• Familiarity with modern application frameworks and languages including TypeScript, React, Redux, and GraphQL.
• Familiarity with best practices in API design.
• Familiarity with a variety of datastore technologies (i.e. Redis, MongoDB, Elasticsearch, Postgres).
• Familiarity with Infrastructure as Code technologies (i.e. CloudFormation Template, terraform, ansible).
• Familiarity with container technologies (i.e. Docker), and experience setting up CI/CD solutions that containerize web applications and automatically deploy to various environments.
• Familiarity with multi-environment deployment strategies for microservice applications.
• Experience working with offshore or distributed teams, and familiarity using communication tools like Slack.
• Interest in innovations in web technologies and familiarity with many media types that power rich multimedia experiences.
• HTML5 game development experience with pixiJS, Phaser.io or similar 2D game engine a plus. Experience with Spine or other 2D animation technologies a plus. 

We like people who:

• Collaborate effectively with stakeholders and other team members (product managers, UI/UX designers, engineers, animators, illustrators, data scientists, and others) to define and refine requirements and then execute on them.
• Have the ability and are willing to switch programming languages as necessary.
• Have an entrepreneurial mindset and know-how to balance speed to market and elegance in technical design.
• Are passionate about and thrive in a culture of learning and teaching. You love challenging yourself to constantly improve, and sharing your knowledge to empower others.
• Care about solving big, systemic problems. You look beyond the surface to understand the root causes so that you can build a complete and long-term solution for the whole ecosystem.
• Want to be part of an organization with a transparent and agile environment where you can communicate freely and openly.

What you’ll get:

• HOMER offers competitive compensation including equity and full benefits.
• Smart, passionate, and engaged co-workers.
• Excellent top-tier Medical/Dental/Vision benefits.
• The chance to have a big impact, quickly.
• Help bring a love of reading and learning to children globally!

HOMER is a proud equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will be considered without regard to race, color, religion, gender, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, national origin, genetics, disability, age, or veteran status.

At HOMER, we are committed to building a diverse team of talented people who are passionate about creating educational content kids love. We believe in fostering a culture where productivity can flourish, one that is empathetic, respectful, and inclusive. At HOMER, we know that diversity, equity, and inclusion aren’t just an idea, a one-time initiative, or phrases to throw into a job post: they’re a daily practice and an ongoing conversation. We survey our team about inclusivity, run trainings on DEI topics, and have a committee to ensure we are all continuing to learn and grow.