Magoosh | Software Engineer (Mid-level or Senior) | Berkeley, CA | ONSITE | Full-time | https://magoosh.com
Magoosh is fixing a broken test prep industry. We’re a growing team of 33 in-office employees in the San Francisco Bay Area. We've been around for 7 years, are profitable, and growing steadily.
Why should students have to put up with exorbitant prices for boring test prep classes and books that might not even work? With Magoosh, they don’t have to. Our mission is simple: create products that give students everywhere access to enjoyable, affordable, and quality test prep. We help millions study at their own pace, on their own time regardless of location, social status, or background. Our team is driven to create the best content and study tools because we’re out to change the test prep experience for all.
We’re looking for a Software Engineer. You’ll bring your knowledge and experience to help us improve our products and ship bigger and better experiences for our students. You'll join a small, but impactful team of 3 engineers. As a core member of our small engineering team, you’ll have an opportunity to help us shape our engineering practices as we grow.
Our stack is Ruby on Rails, React (we use Typescript), and React Native.
Experience: Senior engineer in the SF Bay Area mainly working with Ruby on Rails and React. I've led and worked on teams at very small to mid-size startups for about 6 years.
Looking for: I'm currently working full-time and looking for an additional part-time opportunity of about 10 hours a week.
Some areas I've worked in recently: E-commerce (storefronts, payments, gift cards, order management, warehouse management), ATS integrations, A/B testing signup and onboarding flows
BabyList is making it easier for new parents to prepare for one of the biggest events in their lives. We have an extremely engaged user-base, we’re growing quickly and making real money. Our core product is a universal baby registry, and we are developing our own e-commerce platform and content site. Our HQ is in the Old Oakland neighborhood, 3 blocks from the 12th Street BART. We're a smart and diverse team of 15. Our users actually notice and love what we do (read our AppStore reviews for proof).
Front-end Software Engineer: Our front-end is driven by React/Redux, Sass, Bootstrap, and we recently released a new section of our iOS app powered by React Native. You would join an excellent product team of 4 software engineers and 2 designers.
Requirements:
- You've coded a lot, you're hands on, and passionate about building world class applications.
- Expert-level fluency in Javascript and one modern front-end framework.
- Experience with OOCSS methodologies and an almost unhealthy obsession with keeping CSS (Sass) clean and scalable.
- Experience with modern front-end build tools (Babel, Browserify, Webpack, Gulp, etc).
- User-obsessed. Once you get to know our users, you deeply empathize and genuinely like them. You could get on the phone with a user (or their grandmother) if they were having an issue.
- You’re opinionated and care intensely about the little details that make a great user experience.
Senior Fullstack Engineer: Our server-side code is powered by Ruby on Rails, MySQL and Redis.
Requirements:
- You've coded a lot, you're hands on, and passionate about building world class applications.
- Expert-level fluency in at least one of Ruby, Java, Python, or another modern server-side object-oriented programming language.
- Bachelors in CS, or equivalent experience.
- Experience designing and implementing scalable web services.
- Deep knowledge of testing best practices and continuous deployment.
I'd love to tell you more over the phone or in person. Contact me at evan[at]babyli.st or see our jobs page for other open positions - https://babyli.st/jobs
There are 3 broad groups of geocoding services out there.
1. Free tier with only a few allowed uses (and enterprise access starting in the 5 figures). Google maps falls into this category as in the free tier you can only use the geocoding results to display points on a Google Map that is freely accessible. Google obviously has great results and is worldwide.
2. Open to everyone but rate limited. This is where Nominatim/Open Street Map falls. They have coverage worldwide and you can freely access the API, but with only 1 request per second. I also found that they could not find results for quite a few addresses I tested which were returned easily by other services.
3. Paid API with no restrictions on use. This is where LatLon.io falls and Opencage as well. They look to have a pretty good product and will be a good competitor!
The input focus would be a good usability upgrade - thanks. It does actually do reverse geocoding as well, but there is not "try-it" feature for that part of the API yet. The docs for that functionality are here - https://latlon.io/documentation#reverse-geocode. What specific type of info are you looking to get when turning those lat/lon pairs into addresses?
I've been working on a side project that needs to geocode a large amount of addresses, so as a tangent I built this geocoding API over the past month. The state of open source geocoding tools is pretty amazing, especially if you only need to geocode addresses in the US.
I explored Nominatim, which uses Open Street Map data, and PostGIS before settling on PostGIS. Nominatim has the ability to geocode international addresses, which is a huge plus, but it runs as a standalone web service and its address parser seemed to have trouble with many addresses that PostGIS handled well. PostGIS can be setup with the US census Tiger/Line data to cover the entire country and runs directly in the database which gives quite a performance boost.
I was surprised that the presence and importance of teaching the arts in school wasn't mentioned given Paul's background. Aside from the inherent benefit of learning art for art's sake, it requires self-discipline and relentless self critique. No artist thinks they will just be "ok", they want to be the best. I think this type of self-driven pursuit would benefit any young person on their path towards a startup.
This is actually what I am working on right now. The current site has been up for about 2 weeks and I am adding all of the other features behind the scenes. I haven't had a lot of traffic to the site yet, but a decent number have left their emails so it does appear there is some demand for the service.
Any advice on how to step into the tech/startup world? I just moved out to LA, and have about 4 months before I must have some income coming in. I want to use that time to experiment with some different career paths and to learn.
My work experience is not related to tech work, but I have a passion for it and have been working on side projects for a long time. Where should I start to get my feet wet?
Are you referencing the work for free portion of my post, or a general liability that taking a new person onboard entails? I am not familiar with California's laws on the former, but would certainly want to be in compliance. My choice of the word 'free' was to highlight that I am looking for compensation in the form of learning and connections rather than money. Not sure how the latter would work exactly - I would hope to demonstrate to anyone interested that I am competent enough to not interfere with the status quo of their business and the legalities surrounding it.
Thanks for raising this issue, I hadn't considered it before.
Another way to do this would be to structure it as a contractor to be paid $100/week for general consulting; something that insulates your friendly employer from any risk with bringing you on board.
Magoosh is fixing a broken test prep industry. We’re a growing team of 33 in-office employees in the San Francisco Bay Area. We've been around for 7 years, are profitable, and growing steadily.
Why should students have to put up with exorbitant prices for boring test prep classes and books that might not even work? With Magoosh, they don’t have to. Our mission is simple: create products that give students everywhere access to enjoyable, affordable, and quality test prep. We help millions study at their own pace, on their own time regardless of location, social status, or background. Our team is driven to create the best content and study tools because we’re out to change the test prep experience for all.
We’re looking for a Software Engineer. You’ll bring your knowledge and experience to help us improve our products and ship bigger and better experiences for our students. You'll join a small, but impactful team of 3 engineers. As a core member of our small engineering team, you’ll have an opportunity to help us shape our engineering practices as we grow.
Our stack is Ruby on Rails, React (we use Typescript), and React Native.
Full job description here: https://magoosh.com/careers/
I'm the hiring manager - feel free to reach out with any questions or interest at evan@magoosh.com.