Founded by the creator of the YOU DON'T KNOW JACK® game series, The Jellyvision Lab, Inc. creates virtual teachers, advisors, and salespeople who make online learning and decision making delightful.  In all that we do, our goal is to make complex topics simple and boring material interesting, using a combination of great design, unexpectedly funny content, and serious technology.  

Of all the virtual people Jellyvision has created, the tallest and least afraid of bears is ALEX® (www.meetalex.com). ALEX helps companies talk their employees through the tricky choices they’ll have to make, like picking a health insurance plan, deciding how much to put in the 401(k), or whether they might want extra life insurance. Our customers love ALEX because ALEX helps their employees figure out what’s best for their personal situations, which, in turn, saves our customers a boat-load of time and money - everybody wins! As we sell more and more of ALEX, we need more and more non-virtual (i.e., real life) people to keep the virtual ones amazing. That’s where you come in.

SO WHAT'S THIS JOB ABOUT?

You will organize, lead, and nurture our developers. You're a bright, amazingly focused, detail-oriented, all around lovely person helping a small team to accomplish the following:

• Deliver products
• Collaborate with product owners and project managers
• Ensure quality and alignment with Jellyvision’s coding standards
• Hire new engineering talent
• Mentor and grow developers.
• Keep things “on track”: one-on-ones, code review and team stand-ups
• Clear the road for the team. Identify and remove obstacles.

Jellyvision is a wonderful place for developers to learn and grow, but they need someone to help them navigate beyond the day-to-day challenges and look towards the future of the product while keeping an eye on our developers’ career path, too.  A good technical manager is both an advocate for the developers and a strong leader who helps us write scalable code while developing scalable developers.

WHAT KIND OF SKILLS SHOULD I HAVE?

First and foremost, you are a great communicator.  You're a fluent translator between tech and non-tech. Second, you are organized.  The nature of the work perpetually evolves.  You bring together the current state of things, into a big picture view and recognize threats and opportunities along the tech roadmap. Third, well, the third thing is actually the following list of skills:

• Excellent understanding of engineering- you don't have to have been an engineer, but you do need to understand what it is to be one. Good engineering managers understand the realities and difficulties of being an engineer, but how isn't important how you came to that understanding . You just need to be able to communicate effectively with your engineers and guide them well.
• Experience with Agile – our engineers are an Agile team in the early adoption phase. You are able to take the standard methodologies and collaborate with our Scrum Masters to adapt them to the situation at hand.
• Successful history of leading a development team – helping folks grow and improve their skills is important to us, but the right person for this job will definitely be bringing some experience with them. You should be able to tell us about past experiences that typify your approach as a manager.
• Commitment to building & supporting diverse teams– we are members of an industry that has a poor track record when it comes to issues of diversity. At Jellyvision, we're serious about building an engineering team that reflects the full breadth of American society. As a manager, you will share the responsibility of building and supporting that team, so you need to understand and care about the relevant issues. 
• Empathy- learn from and listen to your team members and colleagues. You and your team are all in this together.

WHAT TEAMS ARE YOU HIRING FOR?

We have a few teams that need managers. To be successful, you're going to need some good technical grounding in the technologies and techniques that are their bread and butter. You'll need to be able to guide our teams, facilitate their discussion with each other and with other teams as well as provide critical insight into their designs.

You won't be responsible for creating or implementing designs. Instead, your job is to be effective in helping the teams do that themselves.

Part of our conversations with you will be to determine where you'd fit best.

• Applications- We have a few teams doing full stack application development. They're using React and Angular on the front end; on the back end it's Ruby (Rails and Grape) or PHP (depending on the age of the system).
• Platform - We have a team responsible for services and APIs shared across our products. They also build Ruby and PHP systems. They're building RESTful services and working towards a Microservices approach to deployment and development.
• Data- We build and maintain our own analytics pipeline and have some excellent data engineers on this team. Python is the language of choice for this team, but the bulk of their expertise is in the attendant systems like SQS, Airflow, Redshift, etc.

ANYTHING ELSE?

Yes.  We share a commitment to excellence and a desire to work in a comfortable, friendly atmosphere, so we hire nice, bright, funny people who are willing to work hard.  Our credo is a simple one: be helpful. And we believe we can be most helpful if our workforce is as diverse in thought, perspective, and culture as the people who use our products. We are looking to add amazing folks to our team who will bring diversity across many lines, including race, ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation, age, marital status, disability, gender identity, sex, and country of origin.

ARE THERE ANY PERKS? Yes, we love perks.

• Competitive pay, stock options and benefits.  401(k) with matching.  And we pay 100% of the cost of premiums for medical, dental, vision, disability and life insurance for our employees (as long as you qualify for our tobacco-free discount; if you’re a tobacco user, your medical premiums will be higher than $0).  We also cover a really nice chunk of the cost of premiums for spouse/partner/dependent medical, dental and vision insurance.
• Casual dress and a flexible schedule.  Come in a sweatshirt, jeans, whatever, like everyone else here.
• Creative work environment. We are lucky to work in a place that is full of intelligent, talented and innovative folks. Although most hours the place is deathly quiet (we're a focused bunch), this is punctuated with hilarious outbursts and general merriment, which makes a nice way to spend the day.
• Free food. Every week, we stock our kitchen with free healthy snack foods, and we have a “hot lunch” catered once a week to give people a reason to hang out and eat together.
• Easy transportation. We’re really close to the 'L' and the Halsted (#8) bus (right by the Apple Store and Mega Whole Foods too), and we have a transit FSA that allows you to dedicate pre-tax dollars to public transportation expenses. And a number of our employees like to bike to work, so we also have showers and lockers in the office.
• Did we mention our yoga class?  We bring a pro instructor right to the office.  Fully subsidized by Jellyvision and fully optional, btw. 
• Oh! And we have a massage chair. Not just any massage chair, my friend.  It’s the HumanTouch HT 5320 WholeBody™ Massage Chair. Feeling a little stiff? Sit down. Relax. Feel better? Good. Okay, back to work.

INTERESTED? Great, we look forward to reading your application - make sure it includes:

• A cover letter that highlights three reasons you think you’d be great for the gig, focusing on how your past work experience has prepared you for this kind of position – or why you think you can rock the job even though you don’t have past work experience that’s perfectly aligned. Writing is key to all that we do, and we weigh cover letters heavily.
• Your resume.

You will receive an auto-reply confirming that we've received your application.

If you decide to apply, please know that every complete application will be carefully reviewed.  Seriously!  We know it is a time commitment to prepare an application. And we respect that effort by thoughtfully reviewing every complete application and responding one way or the other. But that kind of thoughtful review means that it sometimes takes us awhile to get back to applicants, so please NO PHONE CALLS. The time we spend responding to phone calls and emails inquiring about where we are in the process is time that we could be spending actually moving the process along – so please be patient with us!
 
Thanks for your interest in Jellyvision!