We are a quickly growing, funded ed-tech startup located in River North disrupting a multi-billion dollar textbook industry with some of Chicago’s best behind us as investors, including Mark Cuban, Mark Achler, and Howard Tullman, among others.
Packback is just a few months fresh out of a successful beta, have closed a seed round of funding backed by powerful Chicago investors, and are on the heels of our airing on the ABC hit TV show “Shark Tank”. We’re growing and scaling faster than ever, and are looking for talented engineers to contribute and make a big impact to a site re-write.
Company Overview
Packback introduces the first ever microtransaction model to content delivery in higher education and are working with major publishers to change the face of this industry. We rent digital textbooks on-demand for $5 or less. Need it longer? Rent it for the semester at a discount based on how many times you've previously rented. Broke students spend too much money on expensive books they never use, while publishers receive no revenue on 75% of the market due to used books. We solve both issues in a mutually beneficial way. While the first iteration of our product focuses on e-commerce, our future is geared towards an educational platform involving Q&A communities, crowdsourcing, content discovery/recommendation, and big data.
Responsibilities
We’re looking for an individual to provide technical leadership and make key decisions when coding Packback's new initiatives. He/she will be working directly with the CTO (www.linkedin.com/in/dgoel07) as well as our engineering resources in Chicago & India. This individual will be hands-on in the day-to-day code development, conducting code reviews, is experienced and disciplined in Agile project management best practices, and will be architecting new products.
This position entails a mix of architecture (25%), coding (25%), code reviewing (25%) and project management (25%).
Experience
- Bachelor’s degree in IT, CS, Software Engineering, or similar.
- 4-7+ years of experience
- Ability to work in a team environment and leading engineers in the delivery of products
- Advances current job knowledge by researching new technologies, participating in educational opportunities, reading professional publications, maintaining personal networks and participating in professional organizations
- Demonstrated understanding of the latest web production and coding patterns and standards
- Experienced in MySQL configuration and optimization
- Experience with code versioning (SVN or git) and Software Release Methodology under Agile Development practices
- UI/UX Best Practices, XHTML / CSS, AJAX, JQuery, CakePHP, Consumption of APIs using REST and JSON
- Understanding of application architecture diagramming and screen development using Visio, Balsamiq (or other similar wire framing programs)
- Interest in or experience with Mobile applications
- Experience working with offshore teams is a big plus
More info on Packback at www.packbackbooks.com