The context:
Across the developing world, more children than ever are in school – but they are not learning. A recent study estimated that less than 1% of school children in Sub-Saharan Africa attend a school where the teaching meets basic standards of quality. At Rising Academies, we’re changing that, and we want your help.
About us:
We are a growing network of inspiring schools in West Africa. Our mission is to unleash the full potential of every student, equipping them with the knowledge, skills, and character to succeed in further study, work, and day-to-day life. We support more than 250,000 students across Sierra Leone, Liberia, and Ghana through a combination of low cost private schools we manage directly, and partnership schools we manage in collaboration with governments. Independent evaluations have found that Rising students make learning gains two to three times larger than their peers in comparable schools.
We have recently closed our Series A funding round and won a multi-year, multi-million dollar grant to accelerate the development of our digital ed-tech solutions for low-income students across the globe. Our ‘Bambai’ suite of digital tools already includes a school information system, school observation tool, chatbot tutor, accelerated learning program and teacher coaching app. This is just the start. We want to expand our range of digital products to help improve the quality of education for millions of students around the world. If you want to make a difference to the lives of teachers, students and parents, then we are the right place for you.
About the role:
We are seeking a highly motivated, professional, and natural leader for a full-stack Senior Engineer, reporting to the CTO at Rising Academies. The Senior Software Engineer will plan and direct development work on complex products, along with engaging various teams in design and development of solutions that are used by school leaders, teachers, students, and parents across sub-Saharan Africa and beyond. On the leadership front, the Senior Software Engineer will manage, train, and mentor a team of Engineers and Developers. By working with the other departments and teams, the Senior Engineer will lead the execution of various key products at Rising.
The Senior Software Engineer will:
- Leverage MongoDB, Express, Angular, React, and Node to help build web applications.
- Serve as Rising’s engineering leader and technical expert.
- Build from scratch, and manage, a new software development team, which will require defining scope of roles and projects, allocating resourcing, and handling scale up of software products.
- Create detailed engineering plans, processes, and procedures for engineering staff to use.
- Hold engineering staff accountable to relevant protocols and procedures, as well as project expectations and deadlines.
- Propose and oversee budgets and timelines for engineering projects, working hand in hand with the Product Team to ensure deadlines are realistic and always met.
- Support Business Development teams to assess technical feasibility of proposed solutions.
- Work with Academic and Country teams to understand requirements and create design documents as required.
- Build new features and improve existing features using modern best-practices such as version control, continuous integration, automated tests, and daily deploys.
- Effectively communicate and collaborate with our multicultural Development, Product, Data, and Impact teams, among others, around the globe.
- Build software that can be easily and effectively used by groups of people facing unique challenges (remote locations, low levels of literacy, no experience with technology, etc.).
- Spearhead various research and development initiatives to identify opportunities for new products and improve processes.
- Design and implement scalable web services, applications, and APIs that primarily work offline or with limited connectivity.
- Identify bottlenecks and improve software efficiency.