Head of Engineering

Company Overview

Abl believes every student deserves the opportunity to make informed and meaningful choices about their life and future. Unfortunately, many students aren’t given the same opportunities due to systemic inequities. Abl offers advanced, data driven software and services to help K12 school and district leaders identify and remove those inequities. We currently do this work with some of the largest districts in the country, such as Los Angeles Unified, New York Dept of Ed, Portland Public Schools, Denver Public Schools, and the state of Washington. 

We’re looking for a Head of Engineering to lead, develop, and grow our team of six mission-driven engineers. You have a passion for education and will play a critical role joining an experienced and fast-paced R&D team to develop critical software that helps schools operate more equitably.

Responsibilities

• Technical Strategy and Roadmap. We are growing our products and the complexity of the data and services we provide. You’ll identify opportunities for our Technical Roadmap to accelerate our short and long term impact, value, and business goals. In addition to working with the Engineering team, you’ll collaborate with the broader R&D team (Product Design, Data Science and Data Operations), Services (education consultants), Sales, Marketing and Operations. 

• Engineering Leadership. You’ll create opportunities for engineers to be more impactful across the company. You’ll recruit and develop a diverse engineering team that executes well, grows professionally, and plays a strong role in the company vision and direction. 

• Culture of Equity & Inclusiveness. You promote a positive and inclusive company culture. You foster trust and transparency in order to create an environment that people can thrive in. 

• Communication & Feedback. You are empathetic, a great communicator and know when to speak up and when to listen. 

• Technical Excellence. You’ll be accountable for maintaining a high technical standard and helping your team deliver quality work with speed by removing roadblocks. We expect you to roll up your sleeves and pitch in with code reviews, architectural reviews, and technical mentoring.

Qualifications

The ideal candidate has:

• Experience building web applications utilizing modern frameworks and libraries

• Experience using complex data to deliver impactful and scalable web applications

• Experience stewarding customer data from ingestion to insight

• Excellent communication and interpersonal skills: empathy, listening and the ability to deliver meaningful and actionable feedback in all situations

• 5+ years of engineering management experience

Bonus points for:

• Technical depth in our tech stack (Ruby on Rails, React, Apollo and/or GraphQL, Python) 

• Experience transitioning in-person to remote engineering teams, both in-house and contractors (Our team is currently fully remote, with mostly West coast hours)

• Executive experience or experience in education

Company Culture

Abl employees share a passion for revolutionizing education through school design, whether or not they have prior experience working in the field. We value diversity of background and thought. We strive to create a safe and supportive environment where trust, communication, creativity, and humility are valued as highly as technical skills. We believe shared ownership builds a more resilient company, and we tackle hard problems, together. If that sounds like your dream work environment, we look forward to hearing from you.

A Note to Candidates

Studies have shown that women and people of color are less likely to apply for jobs unless they believe they check all the boxes listed in a job description. We are most interested in finding the best candidate for the job, and that candidate may be one who comes from a less traditional background. We encourage you to apply, even if you don't believe you meet every one of our qualifications described.