Head of Software Engineering

We are on a mission to advance equity in education.

Avela provides software to empower high performing districts to support parents and make data-driven decisions that put equity and accountability at the forefront. Our software is built on Nobel Prize winning algorithms by renowned MIT professors.

We recently raised a pre-seed round from Eric Schmidt’s fund and are launching several pilots across the country - and we need your help!  

Interested applicants should visit https://jobs.lever.co/avela/ba10544e-5d02-494c-b885-2fa5069acaeb?lever-source=WorkForGood to apply.

Team

We are a passionate team of entrepreneurs, engineers, economists, and data scientists. We were founded by Parag Pathak, Josh Angrist, and Greg Bybee, who share a vision for public education to prioritize equity, accountability, and quality. 

Parag and Josh are education and labor economists who have worked with school districts in New York, Boston, Chicago, New Orleans, Denver, and more. Greg is a social entrepreneur and education activist in Silicon Valley who previously founded PoliScribe and worked at NovoEd, Coursera, NewSchools Venture Fund, and McKinsey.  

You can read more about the team at avela.org/team. 

Role

We’re looking for a teammate who’s ready to build delightful software to simplify some of the most complex decisions our parents and educators make.  We need a partner who is ready to roll up their sleeves and work with us, our customers, and industry leaders to build a roadmap for the future, find product-market fit, and ultimately design and build compelling products.

You will be one of our first teammates and a senior leader on the team.  As such, you’ll have your hands in everything, including product management, design, and software development of course, but also operations, sales, marketing, customer service - you name it, you’ll help with it. 

This role is a good fit for an entrepreneurial leader who is excited to build a company from the ground up. But unlike a typical founder, this role offers the best of both worlds - you’re joining a startup with early traction, serious credibility, and money raised - and that means a compelling blend of cash and equity compensation, plus fantastic benefits, but with all the fun challenges and learning that comes with building a company.

Responsibilities

•  
• Find product-market fit
  • Explore product-market opportunities and co-create products with our customers. 
  • We’ll work directly with our customers in early pilots to build early prototypes and MVPs.  We’ll constantly iterate and expand our base until we’ve landed on a groundbreaking product that we can sell to thousands of school districts and impact millions of students.
  • You’ll start as our first product manager and designer, in collaboration with the founders.
• Build and manage an engineering organization. 
  • Establish the culture and processes for a high performing software development team.
  • Recruit and hire extraordinary talent.
  • Motivate and lead your team to accomplish the impossible.
• Develop groundbreaking software.
  • Establish the technical architecture and guidelines for a scalable application.
  • Develop the back-end and front-end of the first MVP with your preferred stack.
• Partner to grow our customer base and delight our customers.
  • Help promote and sell our products, including joining or leading sales conversations, developing and leading customer demos, helping to create product marketing collateral, and more.
  • Offering technical support for our customers. Until we grow our customer success team, we’ll need help from the entire engineering team to support our customers with technical issues.

Qualifications

• Customer-centric mindset
• Entrepreneurial spirit and drive
• Extraordinary comfort with ambiguity
• Enjoyment wearing many hats
• Passion for education, equity, or social impact
• Technical acumen and software development expertise
• Experience building delightful SAAS products
• Legal ability to work in the US, based in the USA.
• Experience leading an engineering organization (preferred)
• Startup experience, ideally as a founder or early employee (preferred)
• Experience with enterprise software and B2B business models (preferred)

Benefits

• Competitive salary.
• Significant equity stake as a very early employee.
• Flexible time off policy with no defined limits, plus all major holidays and encouraged vacations. 
• Full health benefits. (We cover platinum level medical at 100%, and platinum dental and vision at 80%.)
• We will be setting up 401(k) and other retirement programs in the near future.
• Flexible work policies. 
• Your choice of top-of-the-line technology.
• Passionate, people-first company culture. 

https://jobs.lever.co/avela/ba10544e-5d02-494c-b885-2fa5069acaeb?lever-source=WorkForGood