March 28, 2023 | Harold Hare

We’re Hiring: Senior Back End / API Engineer

Find Your Grind helps students figure out who they are and where they want to go by flipping the script on traditional career planning and focusing on a lifestyle-first approach.

Find Your Grind’s curriculum is designed for middle and high school, and is delivered through an AI-powered approach to learning, self discovery, and career exploration – helping students become future-ready in a rapidly evolving world.

Where You’ll Be

At Find Your Grind we’re a fully remote and distributed team. The Product and Technology departments have members in the USA and Europe, and this role requires someone in any location therein. The role will also require a native speaker level of English.

The Opportunity

The Senior Back End / API Engineer needs to be a talented, experienced, and enthusiastic person, ready to help us shape our services that empower the full Find Your Grind ecosystem. You will be a problem solver, a mentor, a coach, and someone who knows what great looks like, and you’ll be hell bent on making sure everything you, and we do, fits that mold.

You will be joining Find Your Grind in our 2nd year of in-market challenges, and we are incredibly hungry for success. In this opportunity you will be working remotely to help design, build, and maintain our products and services, as well as offering support to our customer success, product, and development teams.

In an EdTech startup like ours, responsibilities are fluid and accountabilities are clear. For this role you’ll be clearly accountable for:

Translating application storyboards and use cases into functional applications
Designing, building, and maintaining efficient, reusable, and reliable applications using our suite of C# services and tools.
Ensuring the best possible performance, quality, and responsiveness of our applications
Collaborating with peers and stakeholders to define, distill, and ship new features in an Agile environment
Helping to define and enforce standards around code quality and organization via peer review
Identifying bottlenecks and bugs, and creating solutions
Continuously deploy using our CI/CD pipelines
Supporting juniors in their work
Documenting development and operational procedures

Benefits

Vacation: Everyone starts at 15 days of Vacation. After your 3rd anniversary, adds 5 more days

Sick Leave: 6 Sick Days per year

Holidays: Everyone gets an additional 12 days of holidays throughout the year

Sabbatical: After 48 months with Find Your Grind, get 4 weeks unpaid leave to explore

Maternity leave: After 12 months with Find Your Grind get 8 weeks paid + 8 weeks unpaid leave

Paternity leave: After 12 months with Find Your Grind get 6 weeks unpaid leave

Giving back: 1 Day per year to volunteer in your community

Where this role sits within Find Your Grind

CEO + President
Director Sales Development
Director Customer Success
VP Engineering
- Senior Back End / API Engineer
VP Product + Learning

The Senior Back End / API Engineer stakeholders

CEO + President
Find Your Grind Leaders (VPs + Directors)
Product & Technology teams
Learning teams

Key attributes we’re looking for…

You have incredible communication and interpersonal skills
You are comfortable leading meetings, presentations, and being center of attention
You’re an educator at heart that loves impacting the lives of others
You are a connector and leader, and showcase incredible relationship building skills
You can take ownership over your responsibilities, are a self-starter, but embrace a team-first mentality
You have the ability to always practice empathy and patience with customers while showcasing resiliency
You are obsessed with the success of others
You are passionate about writing well tested, maintainable, and scalable code
You’ve a tonne of experience with design patterns and principles, and building software in the Cloud
You are passionate about the education industry and are keen to see beneficial outcomes for students and educators alike

You and your background

What styles work at Find Your Grind

The Find Your Grind Senior Back End / API Engineer must have the ability to work cross-functionally and be credible – a difficult trait to define, but an impossible one to ignore. At Find Your Grind, we find credibility often stems from a mix of hard work, and strong relationships across the organization. Put another way: people must enjoy working with you, and history will serve as a good guide!

A typical day at Find Your Grind as a Senior Back End / API Engineer

50% building features, components, services, models, etc

20% collaborating with peers to help refine new features, or triage bugs

10% demoing the amazing work you’ve been doing

10% furthering your knowledge and skills, tech never stops!

10% loving what you do!

What your first 90 days could look like

You’re 10 days in, and…

You’ve felt the love of the Find Your Grind family (You’ll meet our CEOs, Nick and Natasha, in our hiring process), and you’re loving the fact you can bring your whole self to work every day. You’ve completed your Find Your Grind product onboarding as a student, identified your lifestyle matches, and have passed your summative assessments.
You’ve spent time with the key stakeholders and started building relationships
You’ve begun learning the code and product, and started to form ideas on how to move forward and improve

You’re 30 days in and…

Your product knowledge for educators and students has advanced, and you fully see the value proposition.
You’ve delivered your first value! It may have only been a small contribution, but you feel great about it!
Your Slack game is strong and you’re naturally contributing to our positive work environment

You’re 60 days in and…

You’ve been through multiple sprints and are holding your own in sprint refinement, and planning sessions
You’ve begun to think through how we can do things better along two themes, productivity and performance.
You are helping the engineering discipline become a voice in the community
You have developed your relationships with the wider team and have begun to see alignment
You’re 90 days in and…
You’ve led the delivery of a key piece of value for the product
You’re feeling pumped that you’re a key member of the team!
You’re loving working the Find Your Grind way!

Applying for this role

Please email jay@findyourgrind.com with your resumé and a cover letter addressing why you would be amazing at delivering the outcomes we are looking for.

Expect 4 phases for applicants who are contacted to move forward:

Phase 1: Meet and Greet
- A quick 15 minute call for us both to get a feel for each other’s energy and perspectives on the world
Phase 2: Show us your skillz
- A short take home exercise (NOT a test) to show off what you can do when it comes to coding
Phase 3: Discover More & Meet a Peer
- A 45 minute, role-based interview, where you’ll get to find out a lot more about us, and we’ll be keen to do the same with you
Phase 4: Confirmation
- This phase is designed to give us, and you, time to address any final assumptions or questions we may have about each other, before an offer may be presented