Redefining Higher Education

To change the world, we need to improve education everywhere. Minerva offers a next-generation educational system based on leading scientific research. Built to address the central educational challenges of the modern era, the Minerva system enables the rapid development of sophisticated programs for organizations of all types—from university partners to corporate employers.

To prove the value of our next-generation educational system, we re-reimagined and built Minerva University from the ground up, which has been ranked Ranked #1 Most Innovative University in the World according to the World's Universities with Real Impact (WURI) (https://www.wuri.world/2022-global-top-100). Read more about Minerva University and the history here (https://www.minerva.edu/).

At the core of the system used by Minerva University and partners alike is an innovative methodology, an advanced educational technology called Minerva Forum, and a modular curriculum design. By emphasizing active class participation, deliberate practice, and other empirically-proven methods, the system teaches students critical skills, as well as the ability to apply those skills to diverse and changing contexts. Watch our CEO and founder Ben Nelson discuss the Minerva Forum and our mission in this panel discussion from the 2019 ASU GSV Summit (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ouqVnkgwpmE&t=1m56s).

We need you to lead the development of that technology. You'll lead a small team of 15 to 20 engineers that work in close consultation with other teams—including product management, marketing, academic, and company leadership. Our engineers stick with us for a long time and thus many are senior simply from the work they've done at Minerva. The reason for their longevity is our team culture and values. Read more on our Key Values profile page (https://www.keyvalues.com/minerva).

Responsibilities

• Leading the development and execution of the engineering roadmap. This includes setting the overall direction and strategy for the engineering team, prioritizing projects and features (along with the product managers), and ensuring that the team has the resources and support it needs to deliver high-quality software on time. This will include tricky judgment calls that weigh engineering projects against product features and then clearly justifying and advocating for essential projects.

• Managing and developing the engineering team. This includes hiring and onboarding new engineers, setting performance goals and expectations, providing feedback and coaching for both engineers and engineering managers, and promoting a positive and collaborative work environment. This may involve mentoring in the form of pair programming on specific projects. It may also involve the challenging job of enforcing performance improvement plans or even letting go of low performers.
• Collaborating across teams. The VP of Engineering will work closely with other departments, such as product management, academic, customer success, and other members of the executive team, to ensure that the engineering team is aligned with the overall business goals and delivering value to customers.
• Ensuring technical excellence. The VP of Engineering will be responsible for ensuring that the engineering team is following best practices and utilizing the most appropriate technologies for the company's needs. This may include implementing processes for code review, testing, and deployment.
• Managing budgets and resource allocation. The VP of Engineering will be responsible for managing the engineering team's budget and allocating resources as needed to support the team's priorities and goals.
• Communicating with stakeholders. The VP of Engineering will be responsible for communicating the status and progress of engineering projects to stakeholders, including the executive team and partners.
• Ensuring compliance with regulations and standards. Ensuring compliance with standards, such as SOC2 and WCAG, will involve collaborating with cross-functional teams, including HR, Product Management, and Internal IT.
• Maintaining relationships with vendors. This includes identifying and evaluating potential vendors, negotiating contracts, managing vendor relationships, and monitoring vendor performance.

Technologies, tools, and processes

We value your ability to lead, make thoughtful tradeoffs, and build maintainable systems, over your past experience with specific technologies. That said, here are some of the tools that we use:

• Python, Django, and Django REST Framework for building applications and APIs.
• Celery for asynchronous jobs and workflows.
• MySQL and Redis for data storage and caching.
• React, webpack, Babel, Marionette, and Backbone for building front-end JavaScript interfaces.
• WebRTC with our own selective forwarding unit (SFU) for real-time video.
• Autobahn pubsub technology to support the many features of our real-time distributed seminar classroom.
• GitHub, CircleCI, codecov, AWS, and NewRelic for building, reviewing, testing, shipping, and operating our systems.
• Slack for collaborating with local and remote coworkers, for integrating code review, deployment, and infrastructure notifications into a social space, and for sharing important GIFs.

Here are some tools we use to plan, calibrate, and organize:

• Use the unit of an “episode” to align planning and goal-setting across teams. Each episode is about four months long.
• Plan high-level development themes at the beginning of each episode.
• Run mini design sprints (http://www.gv.com/sprint/) to design, prototype, and test ideas.
• Gather at a weekly team meeting to reflect on the past week and discuss priorities and collaboration for the coming week.
• Check in through a daily asynchronous standup in Slack to foster accountability, remove blockers, and keep others updated.
• Conduct cross-functional blameless retrospectives (https://codeascraft.com/2012/05/22/blameless-postmortems/) twice per episode.
• Organize structured peer feedback sessions once per episode.
• Support each other giving internal brown-bag technical talks.

Benefits

• Mission-oriented (https://www.minerva.kgi.edu/about/) team and organization
• The spirit of a non-profit university, the focus of a startup
• Sustainable working pace
• Unlimited vacation policy
• Health, dental, vision, commuter checks, and 401K
• Paid parental leave: 12 weeks for moms and 6 weeks for dads
• Competitive salary and stock compensation
• Professional development budget with 1:1 matching

Equal Employment Opportunity

To build a university for 21st century leaders and creators, our team should be representative of our diverse student body. Minerva values a diverse workplace and strongly encourages women, people of color, LGBTQIA individuals, people with disabilities, members of ethnic minorities, foreign-born residents, and veterans to apply. Minerva is an equal opportunity employer. Applicants will not be discriminated against because of any characteristic irrelevant to creating great software, including: race, color, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, age, religion, national origin, disability, ancestry, marital status, veteran status, medical condition or any protected category prohibited by local, state or federal laws.

How To Apply

Interested? We make applying quick and easy. Send us:

• A copy of your resume or a link to something resume-like (e.g., your website, LinkedIn)
• A brief description of why you are excited for this opportunity to join Minerva. This description replaces the traditional cover letter.