Description

Trala is a technology powered music education company. Our mission is to make world-class music education accessible to every single person on Earth. 

Right now, private music lessons are so expensive that the joy of music is available only to the rich and urban. Imagine instead a world where all 4 billion people who will pick up an instrument in the next 20 years could get world-class lessons. Imagine how much more music and joy there would be in the world. That is the future we’re obsessed with realizing.

Our first product, Trala: Learn Violin is a mobile application that teaches anyone how to play violin. We do this using movie-quality tutorial videos featuring famous violinists and signal processing that listens to students play their real violins and gives instant feedback on every mistake. This is crazy-hard and requires us to solve novel problems in signal processing, app design, user psychology, and education theory. 

Over the last 4 years, we have organically grown Trala to 400,000 downloads, a worldwide student base, and support from some of the most famous musicians in the world. Our students are ages 7 to 70 and live in rural Montana, Syria, tiny Pacific islands, Hong Kong, and of course, Chicago. They’re not businesses or governments, they’re people. They’ve dreamt of learning violin for years and we’re fulfilling those dreams. They say things like this to us:

“I had never progressed this far no matter what I did. I just want to say thank you. You made my dream come true”

“I’ve been using Trala for just under three months now and can honestly say it’s changed my life.”

Requirements

You will be the first project manager on the team. You will be responsible for timely execution of all product work at Trala. In other words, you help us ship great features! 

If you’re great at this job, it will grow into a more senior position within 18 months. We've doubled our team size in the last 12 months, and we're growing quickly.

Responsibilities:

• Work with our Product team to effectively scope releases.
• Work with our Marketing and Customer Support teams to communicate product updates to customers.
• Ensure design and engineering sprints are full of estimated tickets; ensure all dependencies with other teams are fulfilled.
• Remove roadblocks for designers and engineers as they come up in any part of the product process: discovery, design, implementation, and/or testing.
• Maintain a steady supply of student interviews for UX team and leadership.
• Communicate ETAs on Product projects to the full team.
• Run Product meetings such as sprint planning and sprint retrospectives.
• Work with our CTO to iterate on and continuously improve our engineering team’s velocity.
• Help write bi-weekly progress reports for the product team.

Who we’re looking for:

• Previous experience as a project manager at a B2C SaaS company. You’ve either been a Senior Project Manager or are ready to take that leap.
• Strong opinions on the right way to build and ship software. 
• Experience in agile software development environments.
• Self-motivated and driven, with a high attention to detail. If you’ve read this far, you’re probably a good fit. 
• Creative. 
• Passion for continuous learning.
• Musical background is ideal but not required. If you don’t have an instrument we’ll get you one :)

Why Trala?

• Trala deeply impacts peoples’ lives all across the world. These are dreams you’ll be fulfilling. Not “leveraged data monetization” or whatever value Facebook claims to provide these days.
• Trala is funded by amazing people like the LinkedIn and Duolingo CEOs. These folks are leaders, and they are invested in helping us become great.
• Trala prioritizes diversity, inclusion, and righting economic and social wrongs. We strive to make our corner of the world a better place.
• You’ll be paid well, have free medical/dental/vision (yes, $0!), and work with people who are the best at what they do.

(Almost) Everybody on our team:

• Sam: CEO. Violinist and engineer. Architect behind Trala’s musical pedagogy. Uses words like ‘pedagogy’.
• Vish: CTO. Winner of 4 national hackathons. Has eaten a Death Sandwich and survived.
• Josh: Lead iOS engineer. Navy submarine officer for 10 years. They finally let him resurface amongst the landfolk but occasionally we see a periscope out of the corner of our eye and he ducks under a table.
• Mariah: Lead Android Engineer. Former D1 Athlete at Princeton. Named after Mariah Carey. Spongebob Enthusiast. Believes in the sanctity of Arby’s.
• Nicolette: Community Manager. Thinks you should pick up your instrument right now. Like, right after you apply for this role though. 
• Molly: Executive Assistant. Gets excited to buy office supplies and is never far from a post it note. Reads psychology experiments for fun, teaches yoga, and hosts french baking shows with her cat. 
• Geoff: Pro violinist. In four bands. Or five. It’s hard to keep track.
• Rachael: Pro violinist. Played at that white-tie gala we weren’t invited to.
• Matthew: Lead API engineer. Boilermaker. Enjoys golf, video games, and piano. Suspiciously good at poker. Knows [editor’s note: thinks] dogs are better than cats. Rescues pitbulls. Sometimes builds websites.
• Erik: VP of Operations. Avid traveller, aspiring drummer, and constantly in search of the perfect one-liner. Won Wheel of Fortune. Lowkey.
• Tatum: Head of Marketing. Storyteller. Loves email, opera, and cooking without a recipe.
• (Also) Josh: Programmer of things that go “bleep” and “bloop” (and things that could go “bleep” or “bloop” if they really wanted to).
• You: Shrouded in mystery (for now).