Senior Back End Engineer

History & Mission 

Founded in 2014 in Montreal, Canada, Paper is an educational support system (ESS) for K-12 schools across North America. The company’s fundamental mission is to bridge the gap between what schools provide and what students need to succeed. As a personalized learning platform that empowers all students and maximizes their lifetime potential, Paper’s team of vetted and trained educators offer 1:1 online tutoring for any subject, at any time. Students communicate with these educators about their challenges with classwork and solve their problems collaboratively via a rich, text-based environment.

Paper closed its first public school deal in 2018 and has subsequently signed numerous districts onto its platform. In 2019, Paper generated $1 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR) and exited 2022 with $68 million ARR. Paper has grown from 174 employees in 2019 to over 1800 employees currently (split between FTEs and Part-time Tutors). 

Today, Paper serves more than 3 million students from over 400+ school districts across 40 US States and Canada with headquarters in both Montreal and Las Vegas. Paper integrates directly into a school district’s existing IT infrastructure and leverages technology to equip all students with personalized learning to maximize outcomes.

Solutions 

The Paper ESS is comprised of three key solutions allowing each student to build a learning profile that is informed by data collected throughout their academic journey and augmented by the data of Paper’s growing network of learners across North America. Since its founding, the company has been optimizing its product and has evolved into a per-student annual subscription license that targets public school districts as the primary customer.

1. Personalized Tutoring: Paper provides students with 24/7 access to tutoring in any subject, anytime from anywhere. Various communication features (including text, voice notes, and a virtual whiteboard) ensure students have an experience that best suits their preferred learning style. Support is available in English, Spanish, French, & Mandarin.

 

2. Practice Center: Paper provides practice tools that support in-class and at-home academic practice in engaging formats that focus on their zone of proximal development, including Math, English, Language, Arts, and Reading fluency.

3. College and Career Readiness: Paper provides students with resources that prepare them for life after high school, including academic planning, college and career readiness tools, work-based learning, and micro-credentials. Paper helps ensure every student’s education leads to a successful career outcome, whether through a degree or going into the workforce.

Additionally, the company’s platform delivers a portal for teachers and administrators to gain data and analysis of a student’s competencies and progress. 

Financial Sponsors

Since its founding, Paper has raised over $390 million in financing. In 2016, the company received $1.6 million in seed funding, led by Birchmere Ventures, followed by $7.5 million in a Series A round led by Reach Capital and Bullpen Capital, with participation from Google. In 2020, Paper raised an additional $11 million in funding led by Framework Venture Partners and Salesforce. In June of 2021, the company closed a $100 million Series C led by IVP, and the following year in 2022, Paper closed a Series D financing of $270 million led by Softbank and Sapphire Ventures. 

The Opportunity

Paper grew at an incredibly rapid pace over the COVID-19 pandemic when the world experienced a sudden shift away from the classroom and forced rapid adoption of online learning, education, and virtual tutoring. Post-pandemic, with the democratization of Generative AI and the shift in federal funding, Paper is refocusing its efforts towards a path to profitability.

Job Summary

As a Senior Back End Developer your primary focus will be developing the API which powers the web and mobile applications. You will be working alongside product managers, UI/UX designers, back-end and front-end developers to ensure the timely delivery of secure, accessible, highly performant and robust features. Due to the fast-paced and collaborative nature of the software development team, our ideal candidate will also need excellent teamwork and communication skills.
This position can be located in any geography in the US or Canada.

Job Description

Please use the template below to create a job description & only edit what is highlighted

 

Driven by the mission to democratize education, Paper is the largest provider of educational support, supporting millions of students through partnerships with thousands of school districts. Paper helps deliver true educational equity through their category leading Educational Support System (ESS) that offers virtual access to 24/7 tutors and essay reviewers. Founded in 2014, Paper philosophically believes that all students should be given the tools and resources to reach their academic potential, independent of socio-economic status, geography, language or other barriers. We are headquartered in Montreal, Quebec with remote employees across the US and Canada. Paper is proud to have been named by GSV as one of the most transformational growth companies in digital learning.

This position can be located in any geography in the US or Canada.

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Responsibilities: 

• Implement and ship robust, secure and highly available features to our backend PHP API.

• Write unit, integration, and end-to-end tests.

• Participate in technical design of various tasks.

• Collaborate with CloudOps and Product team members to improve systems data collection for observability, logging and application performance monitoring purposes.

• Refactor code to improve readability and maintainability.

• Participate in team-wide code reviews and provide feedback.

• Stay up to date with PHP ecosystem and Laravel framework updates.

• Provide mentorship and coaching to other junior developers.

• Participate in maintenance and upkeep of technical and API documentation.

• Routinely on-call rotation for incident response management.

About Paper

Paper offers an exciting, dynamic, inclusive work environment putting excellence at the center of everything we do. Our mission is woven into the fabric of our culture, challenging our team to build meaningful and creative solutions. 

We thrive when we collaborate with each other, and use integrity and selflessness to align our business decisions with our mission. We approach every challenge with positivity, achieving the outcome we want regardless of what gets in the way. Our tenacity propels our hyper-growth, where trust is key and we all strive to make an impact every day.

We believe that diverse teams build better products. Paper does not and will not discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, gender, gender orientation, gender expression, age, national origin, disability, marital status, sexual orientation, or military status in any of its activities or operations.

Nobody checks every box, but the Paper team is built by passionate and innovative people who share our mission for democratizing education. If you don’t think you meet all of the requirements above but are still interested in the job, please apply.

PS. Equity is our mission! We make sure to treat all candidates equally: If you are interested please apply through our job board - our amazing talent team will reach out! Our team isn't able to pass on any calls/ emails our way - and this makes sure that the candidate experience is smooth and fair to everyone.

Requisition ID

R-100268