While our job descriptions describe the engineers we're looking to hire, this page describes how the team and the company work and function in greater detail. If you have more questions don't hesitate to email our CTO Qian Wang (qian@informedk12.com)
We’re a growing 30-person edtech company (pictured above) from diverse backgrounds with a shared vision for solving a complex, long-standing problem in education.
While there are other School Administration platforms, none of them work the way that we do: meeting the schools where they are and helping them improve without requiring structural process changes. We are powering the future of school district operations, enabling administrators to hire the right teachers for the right classrooms faster, defining programs for Special Ed students, dealing with ever changing COVID-19 requirements, managing bus routes for students without permanent housing, ensuring teachers get reimbursed and paid on time, and a lot more.
As a business, we're growing and doing so in a sustainable way. Our goal is to build a company that truly enables schools to operate more efficiently to better serve their families. That's not an easy thing to do, so we're focused on ensuring that our company is here for the long haul.
Some stats about the company from February 2020:
All those great folks are working in 5 teams:
This team is the engine of our success. They work with districts to get their workflows set up and working properly, and along the way build strong relationships and understandings of how each district is unique. Those relationships give us great product insight into what works well and what needs work.
We're small, so this is two teams that are set up as one team. The Operations side keeps the lights on and the business running (HR, Recruiting, Culture). The Support side deals with all support requests that come in from the platform as well as using that experience to develop our training programs for districts. The support folks work very closely with the customer success folks to share experiences and make sure our districts are well supported. Engineering works directly with the support team to help when customers get themselves stuck and need help.
This team is special. Imagine a stereotypical successful sales team, now throw those stereotypes out the window but keep the success. Our goal of helping school districts is a core value of the sales process. They approach districts that we can help the most, and do it at a pace that ensures our customer success team isn't overrun no matter what their sales goals are.
This team really really knows how districts work. And what they don't know they find out. Two of the three people on the team are former engineers at Informed K12 (one still submits PRs). They know almost everything about how the product is used and how it works under the hood, which makes for a great relationship with the engineering team.
Hey that's us! There's a lot more about us in the job descriptions, and further down this page.
Their passion around our mission is something that was noticeable from the very start. Jason Crutchfield, one of our favorite customers, talks about meeting our co-founders for the very first time in this video.
They're not on any specific team as they do so much of everything, but they are the straws that stir the drink. Sarah Chou, our CEO, has a long history working in education. She met Qian Wang, our other co-founder, at Stanford where they were both in a program around the intersection of Education and Technology. Their shared desire to improve schools, and Sarah's frustration from not being able to do that within the education system, led them to found Informed K12 and focus on trying to build a platform that can efficiently and meaningfully help schools with their most important processes.
You can read more about some of our customers on our blog: Customer Stories
Our focus on Diversity and Inclusion influences everything that we do. How we sell the software, how we support our customers, and how we build our platform.
We're a small team with a lot of responsibility. Our values help us remember what's important so that we don't get mired in technical debt. There's more about our values on our Engineering Blog
Both our company values and our team values are important to us. You can get to know the people on the team and at the company through our Employee Spotlights blog posts.
We work in small, nimble teams of 2-3 engineers focused on single projects in 8-week cycles. Projects span the entire spectrum of web application opportunities: real-time search, exporting tools, database and server optimization, or building our front end system. We do planning on a quarterly basis and try to focus on projects that are meaningful and impactful.
We take code quality seriously and are constantly improving our codebase. Every project we work on has dedicated time to address tech debt, and we prioritize code quality initiatives on our product roadmap. And we never ship code without writing a full suite of tests (don’t worry, we’ll help in case this is newer to you)!
That's the big question, right? We have a majestic Rails 6.0 monolith that lives on Heroku. Tests and deploys happen in CircleCI (full test suite takes ~6 min), and our code is all in GitHub. We try to use JavaScript/Typescript sparingly, as our platform is primarily about data, but for some pieces of the app, we've got a lot of Typescript interactions as it suits that use case. We fire off a lot of background jobs, and are managing those with Sidekiq. It usually takes half a day to get the dev environment up and running, in terms of downloading things and getting dependencies installed. The code itself is uneven, giving its 7 year history, but it's got a high floor. While we do take time to maintain it, there's lots of places where it's very impactful to refactor and re-architect.
We are building a workflow and reporting platform that has to be powerful enough to support hundreds of unique approval processes in a school district but easy enough for anyone to use - from the Chief Business Officer, to custodians, to teachers and parents.
To meet the needs of this wide variety of users, there are thousands of unique forms and processes on our system. Our backend models need to be flexible enough to support a wide variety of use cases but structured enough to allow for scale and data retrieval across the entire system.
Other technical challenges may relate to data security and privacy, as our forms collect sensitive employee and student information; customized bulk data exports in a variety of formats (csv, pdf, zip); and seasonality and large spikes in usage. Finally, because our districts rely on us for their critical operational processes, we must ensure our system is reliable and stable.
Industry standard compensation and benefits: Paid parental leave, Flexible hours, Work from home, Untracked vacation days, Company retreats, Health insurance, 401(k), Commuter Benefits (for whenever we can go back to the office) Team activities, and Company-wide volunteer/community activities.
