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 entry level PHP developer individual to work with our small team of local and offshore engineers. He/she will be working directly with the CTO (www.linkedin.com/in/dgoel07) and Engineering Manager (www.linkedin.com/in/karllhughes) to implement bug fixes, new features, and contribute to a site rewrite starting in the summer of 2014.
This individual will be hands-on in the day-to-day code development, participating in code reviews, and taking leadership of their own projects.
Experience
- Bachelor’s degree in IT, CS, Software Engineering, or similar
- 1-3 years of experience writing code, preferably in PHP, Javascript, or other web languages
- Experience working in small to mid-sized software teams
- Startup experience is a big plus
- Experience with version control systems (eg: git)
- Interest in or experience with Mobile applications
More info on Packback at www.packbackbooks.com