Software Engineer, Core Technology

Job Level
Mid-level position
Job Category
Engineer / Architect
Sector
  • Systems / Operations
Job Status
Areas of Responsibility
  • Software

IXL Learning, a leading edtech company with products used by 7 million students worldwide, is seeking Software Engineers who have a passion for technology and education to help us build and maintain the core infrastructure for our extremely successful educational products.

The Core Technology team is responsible for researching, implementing, and maintaining back-end frameworks and server-side technologies used by our engineers and applications. The team also monitors and ensures all production and development environments are stable and provides support to other team members with the whole development cycle. Source control, the build and runtime system, as well as deployments, are all responsibilities of the Core Technology team.

As a Software Engineer on our Core Technology team, you’ll work closely with our product teams and have visibility to all parts of our code and products, focusing on performance, uptime, scalability, and reliability. We find it immensely satisfying to develop products that impact the lives of millions, and we are eager to have you join our team.

International candidates encouraged to apply; H1B sponsorship is available.

WHAT YOU'LL BE DOING

  • Design, build, and maintain scalable and robust infrastructure and services for all of our products

  • Participate in live performance monitoring, which includes building the tools that allow us to detect and address trouble spots

  • Troubleshoot and fix production performance and security issues

  • Develop tools, procedures, and documentation to improve team efficiency

TECHNOLOGY

The Core Technology team contributes to our Java-based code base, especially for back-end code, as well as configuring our web stack (Apache, Tomcat, Struts, Hibernate). Our servers run RedHat Linux and some amount of administration is done on the systems. We use a variety of storage technologies, which we configure and run, including Cassandra, Oracle, Redis, S3, and Zookeeper. Python and Perl scripting are used extensively for our build and deployment systems. An ever-increasing portion of our infrastructure is moving to EC2. So, AWS technologies are also utilized. We use Jenkins and crontab for CI. We investigate and implement new technologies all the time, and this list is always growing.

 

WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR

  • Bachelor's or advanced degree in computer science or a related discipline

  • Have a solid grasp of general programming principles

  • Passion for building back-end software that is fast, bulletproof, modular, and easy to use

  • Comfortable both building new systems from scratch and also retrofitting existing systems

  • Excellent programming skills in Java or other object-oriented language

  • Experience with Linux/Unix, SQL, and scripting languages

  • Strong analytical-reasoning and problem-solving skills

  • Ability to work both independently and with a wide variety of teams

  • Passion for improving education through technology