Packback is looking for a Full Stack Software Developer to help support our mission of awakening and fueling the lifelong curiosity in every student. As a software engineer at Packback, you will be working on every aspect of our web-based platform.

Our engineering team is a collaborative organization in which our team members have transparency into the business challenges and initiatives. Our Engineers work alongside Product to solve problems, using each of their unique perspectives to develop simple, elegant and student-focused solutions.

In this role, you will be involved with taking business problems/opportunities and carrying them through to performant, sustainable solutions for both our internal and external customers. You will build features that empower students and professors to have a better learning experience, as well as creating tooling to enable our internal teams.

Providing feedback to other engineering team members, pairing, and actively seeking out knowledge to improve our team knowledge-base overall are considered key job duties.

Why You Should Work at Packback

• Our platform, Packback Questions, is used by hundreds of professors, and thousands of college students, who collectively author millions of posts per semester. You will be a part of building a platform that has a huge impact in inspiring curiosity in students.
• Solve interesting technical problems. The engineering team rewards people who like to wear many hats. You can get involved with the front end, back end, infrastructure and data functions.
• Packback is a rapidly growing company. If you like being able to make an impact on a daily basis, we’re a good fit for you.
• Get involved with product development. You will take ownership of features, work alongside the product team, and see what goes into bringing features to market.

Requirements

We’re looking for somebody who is excited to work on both our backend and frontend codebases. To succeed, you should have:

• Comfort working with web frameworks (We use Laravel, but we mainly care that you are a great developer) and/or
• Experience building single-page apps with a JavaScript framework (We use Angular, but again care mainly that you’re solid with the tools of your choice)

In addition, we’re looking for

• Experience writing unit and acceptance tests and a strong grasp of object-oriented programming concepts
• 2+ years of software engineering experience, especially with web-based products. Transferable experience is more important than years of experience.
  • If you have fewer than 2 years of experience, you are still encouraged to apply. We will evaluate you individually based on your skills and growth trajectory.

It's great if you have

• Experience with SCSS / Styling
• Experience working on highly scalable cloud infrastructures
• Comfort with Linux/UNIX systems
• Open source contributions with a variety of technologies
• Startup or small company experience

Job Details & Benefits

Competitive Benefits: Our salary ranges are competitive, and have clear expectations for professional growth. We offer full health insurance; option for dental, vision, and life; Short-term disability insurance, a 401k, and an unlimited vacation policy.

A culture that you can be proud to build: We work hard at building an inclusive culture of curiosity and continuous learning at Packback, where every voice matters and can make an enormous impact on the business. As with any role at Packback, being a good steward of our values, and using them to inform decisions and communication is essential.

A company that invests in you and your family: Packback offers 6 weeks fully paid, gender non-specific extended leave policy (for either parent welcoming a new child through birth or adoption, to care for a family member in need, or for bereavement).

Work-life balance: We have a lovely office located conveniently in the Loop, close to CTA lines and Metra, and offer the opportunity to work from home 2 to 3 days per week

What does Packback do?

Packback exists to awaken and fuel the lifelong curiosity in every student. We are a social learning platform powered by a proprietary A.I. that college professors use to help their students fall in love with the subject matter, drive personalized learning, and most importantly, quantify and improve student critical thinking skills.

Location

This role is located at our office in downtown Chicago. Currently, we are not accepting applications for a remote employee. However, if you are not in Chicago but are planning on relocating here, please apply and let us know in your cover letter! We are happy to interview you remotely until you are in Chicago. Note that Packback cannot provide relocation assistance at this time.

Our commitment to diversity

Working in the Education Technology space, Packback believes it is an ethical necessity for us to work to build a diverse and inclusive team, to help us better consider the needs of our diverse audience of students with a wide range of educational backgrounds and educational needs.

We are an equal opportunity employer and value diversity in our company. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability status.