Remote Job
Senior Back-End Product Engineer
Slang- full_time
- Posted : 4 years ago
We’re looking for talented individuals interested in joining a new and growing global company. At Slang, you’ll be an early team member of a well-funded startup spun out from MIT. We’re building a world-class team to revolutionize language learning with cutting-edge technology and beautiful design.
What we’re working on at Slang
Slang started at MIT as a research project on using AI and NLP to make learning a new language as efficient as possible. Our technology powers a highly adaptive e-learning platform that offers an unprecedented variety of specialized English courses and proficiency tests for career development in over fifty fields like Sales, Finance, Logistics, Medicine, and Law. With just a small team, we’ve already created the largest professional English offering in the world. Now, we’re scaling up to release 1,000 more courses over the next three years.
Learn more about our unique approach at slangapp.com. We’d love to field any questions you have about our product and vision!
What this role is about
If you’re interested in pioneering a way to apply cutting-edge technologies to online education, we would love to tell you more about our opportunity.
In this role, you’ll be involved in both product development and company strategy and execution — you’ll own the research, design, and development of the back ends of new features and you’ll help us refine our product roadmap. We have tens of thousands of active users and many subproblems in language learning to tackle.
As a senior-level member of the team, you will also have the opportunity to step into a technological leadership role as our Engineering Team grows over the next year. There is room at Slang for both technology-focused and management-focused senior-level engineers; a career path which best suits your own professional goals will be established.
In addition to day-to-day engineering needs, technology-focused senior engineers will be responsible for architecting full solutions to complex technological problems and establishing best practices for our engineering processes. Management-focused senior engineers will be responsible for mentorship of junior engineers, recruitment, and structuring the growth of Slang’s Engineering Team. All senior-level engineers play a strong role in code review and coaching.
Our codebase is built with best practices in mind and our product is designed with proper user and developer experience at the forefront of development. The work we’re facing encompasses interesting infrastructural hurdles and data-heavy modeling and algorithmic tasks.
Some of our technology comes from the open-source community, so be prepared to contribute back!
Some interesting problems we’re tackling:
- How can we determine what parts of a language a user already knows from a small sample of test exercises? How should we decide which parts of a language a user should learn next? How can we answer these questions quickly?
- How should we architect our database to support the growing number of activities our users submit every week (currently at more than a million per week)?
- How can we aggregate and communicate the learning statistics of a company’s employees for display to their managers?
- How can we analyze and leverage the massive amount of learner and content data we have to improve our learners’ experience?
Skills and technologies
- Five or more years of experience in modern back-end web development, including:
- Extensive experience with modern web API stacks and related technologies, with a preference for Ruby on Rails and/or Java experience.
- Extensive experience with database technologies, data structures, and related optimization. We currently deal with large amounts of data in PostgreSQL and Redis.
- Experience in engineering leadership roles, perhaps in a position like “tech lead” or “engineering manager.”
- A strong desire to maintain a clean, reliable, maintainable, and efficient codebase.
- Excellent discipline and focus, especially in autonomous environments, and strong English communication skills. We’re a small team and we’re moving quick!
- A plus: interest or experience with computational linguistics, natural-language processing (NLP), language-learning, speech recognition, data science, or machine learning.
To make things easy, include your résumé, GitHub username, and/or a short description or link to something you’ve worked on that’s software- or tech-related. Perhaps a Ruby gem or an interesting data-science paper — surprise us!
Slang is an equal-opportunity employer. We celebrate diversity and are excited about creating an inclusive and healthy environment for all employees.
What Slang can offer you
Our compensation package includes a competitive salary and unique benefits.
Most importantly, we offer the special experience of being part of a fast-moving and quickly growing international company within the entrepreneurial ecosystems of Boston and MIT.
Where we're located
Our team is currently split between Boston, Ciudad de México, São Paulo, Bogotá and Medellín. We are recruiting great people in these locations and around the world.
Our US headquarters is located in the Cambridge Innovation Center in the heart of downtown Boston, easily accessible by public transportation and alongside other innovative companies. Our Colombia office is located in the Rosales neighborhood of Bogotá and in the Ruta N Innovation district of Medellín.
Interested?
We'd love to hear from you — apply below!
Slang is an equal-opportunity employer. We celebrate diversity and are excited about creating an inclusive and healthy environment.
For further information related to Slang, check out recent pieces profiling us in Expansión and Portafolio; the portfolios of our investors, Social Capital and ALLVP (also investors in startups like Slack, Intercom, and Cornershop); our Crunchbase profile; and the profiles of our founders, Diego and Kamran.
Skills
- backend
- postgresql
- Ruby on Rails
