Director of Engineering at Litnerd

Litnerd is a kids reading + writing club app that grew by 14x this past school year. Think of us as a modern-day Scholastic, with a heavy IP play. We create original IP with our community + partner brands -> turn them into books, media and learning curriculum, layered with an AI personalized tutor to help kids learn to read and write in a personalized and engaging way.

Our product format is a Social and Gamified - with a live weekly community meetup and monthly e-tournaments.

• And it works! Litnerd 4x improved the pass rate of students on their annual state Reading (ELA) exam.
• STICKY: Kids spend 10-20 minutes on the Litnerd app OUTSIDE of classroom time.
• KID AUTHORS: Kids are the authors of the books and Litnerd AI helps illustrate + publish the book.
• Built on the Science of Reading
• Original IP: all books, media and courseware is original content created and published by Litnerd. Litnerd’s mission is to inspire young people to fall in love with reading. We provide programs for students and teachers that make reading (and learning in general) fun. We do this by bringing books to life by reenacting our books as if you are watching your favorite TV show. 1 in 8 children in America grow up without learning how to read. 41% of 4th grade students are reading at a grade 1 level. In other words, we are failing nearly half of our nation’s students before they ever graduate elementary school. Furthermore, decline in literacy and reading proficiency increases amongst Title 1 schools socio-economically disadvantaged communities. By joining our team, you will be part of our mission to change that!

Litnerd is a contracted vendor with the largest education district in America. Our program is part of in-classroom education and designated school reading time. We have been growing aggressively at 60% MoM and have served over 30,000 students across schools.

As a member of the Engineering team, you'll be at the center of product innovation, empowering the next generation of readers. We embrace software design best practices, taking code quality and web standards seriously. Litnerd runs a modern, fully-typed stack using technologies like Typescript, React, Node.js, Postgres, Redis, and GraphQL. Check out our eng topology diagram.

• Build and improve on user-facing products such as our Book Reader, Live Polling, and other classroom management tools

• Build reliable backend services that power our web application and mobile apps

• Create admin tools to help us scale managing processes and workflows, including onboarding schools and scheduling live sessions

• Ensure a low-friction experience for our users Build and maintain platform features such as:

• Engineering infrastructure (databases, servers, data pipelines) to keep up with our growing userbase

• CI/CD pipelines to ensure product development moves at a rapid pace

• Automate and scale notifications, such as email and SMS

• Experience with React, Node.JS, NestJS, Typescript (or other typed languages)

• Experience building, testing, and deploying web applications in production environments

• Understanding of systems-level programs (bash, git)

• Experience with functional programming, domain-driven design

• A passion for thoughtful engineering, thorough testing, and a deep sense of ownership over products and code shipped

• Self-starters who excel in a fast-paced startup environment

• Understanding of modern browser features (web workers, local storage)

• Understanding of web best practices including accessibility

• Experience testing code via unit tests and integration tests, both locally and in CI/CD environments

• Understanding of relational databases (Postgres) and migrations in production environments

• Understanding of in-memory and document-based data stores, e.g. Redis, DynamoDB

• Experience building and scaling low latency APIs

• Experience with monitoring and logging in production applications

• Experience with serverless concepts, FaaS, k8s

• Experience developing and maintaining data processing pipelines

• Data modeling experience with relational and non-relational databases

• Work with business stakeholders to create analytics charts, dashboards

• Collect and process analytics data from web properties

• Deep understanding of SQL, Python

• Experience developing and maintaining data processing pipelines Litnerd Engineering Team is responsible for building empowering solutions for elementary school students across the nation. We’re building a powerful platform for teachers and students to access our reading program courses (ebooks, curriculum, assessments, lesson plans, benchmark metrics and more). As a member of this team, you'll be at the center of product innovation. Please see careers page and apply.

By joining the team at this stage, you will have a mission critical role to play in the development of Litnerd’s product roadmap.