Staff Engineer

We are hiring a PHP Staff Engineer to focus on backend application work and technical leadership while contributing to DevOps, data, and frontend work as necessary. We’re a small team, so the blend will depend on the individual and the project.

Ideal candidates will have an incredibly strong Web SaaS background, a decade or two of Web-based professional history, and a deep comfort with PHP. You are consistently assessing whether technical choices are adding or removing system complexity. You enjoy enabling your teammates to do their best work with clear & appropriate feedback, tailored guidance, and thoughtful workload sharing. You are deeply critical of which technical choices and work will have the most meaningful impact on our goals.

This role offers 160K/yr and participation in our ESOP (Employee Stock Option Program) with a 4-year vesting schedule. If you start by 1 April, you’ll be eligible for the company-wide annual 1 July pay raise. If you’re interested in the role but have questions or feedback, please email the hiring manager. No one’s resume will get buried for being critical, it’s kinda the point of the job.

We will accept applications through Friday, 21 February and begin the email screening process as soon as possible. Initial interviews will ideally be scheduled for 24-27 February, and second interviews the week of 10 March. There are two 90-minute interviews (hiring manager + panel) and we request 3 professional references (but let's talk anyway if you have circumstances that make that impossible). We are filling this role ASAP, preferably no later than 1 April. Please note availability concerns in your application! We can be flexible and are happy to accommodate whenever we can. 

About uConnect 

uConnect is on a mission to help more people realize their potential by improving access to career services for all people - early in their lives and throughout their careers. Focused on the traditional higher education market, uConnect's All-In-One Virtual Career Center is used by a wide range of institutions including UCLA, MIT, and Baton Rouge Community College to radically improve utilization of career services, career readiness and student outcomes.  We're a mission-driven team working in a fun and collaborative culture which puts people first. uConnect is backed by leading technology investors including Growth Street Partners, Strada Education and LearnLaunch.

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Core responsibilities

• Collaboratively plan, document, and execute complex web application programming tasks. This is foremost an individual contributor role responsible for shipping.
• Adhere to team coding standards and architectural principles.
• Demonstrate advanced knowledge of one or more relevant programming languages in day-to-day use.
• Demonstrate best practices in submitted code.
• Make informed decisions about what qualifies as in- and out-of-scope for current tasks and communicate those decisions succinctly and thoroughly.
• Raise concerns, questions, and ambiguities for team discussion; lead consensus-building.
• Identify risks in current code, environment, and/or process; recommend alternatives.
• Add automated low-level tests to code as appropriate.
• Troubleshoot existing code for defects, performance issues, or other unwanted behavior.
• Take ownership of overall application code base and be accountable for its long-term health, performance, and alignment with team goals.
• Take on independent investigations or maintenance projects to enable the rest of the team.
• Take a leadership role in overall technical decisions and direction.
• Work cross-functionally with Product, Customer Success, and other stakeholders to identify the best outcomes possible given our goals and constraints.

Secondary responsibilities

• Assist with support and bug triage.
• Assist with CI/CD pipeline as necessary.
• Assist with E2E tests as necessary.
• Improve application observability with logging and automated alerting.
• Explain technical concepts to non-technical stakeholders.
• Guide and mentor other engineers of all levels with their professional growth and learning.
• Assist with hiring engineers as requested.
• Investigate new technologies for applicability to current and future engineering challenges.
• Monitor the broader technology ecosystem for significant changes and brief team.
• Respond to priority support incidents during off-hours in rare business-critical situations.

What will a typical day look like?

• Attend daily engineering standup (Mon-Thu). What’s blocking you, and how can you help your teammates? Sometimes we also do work refinement during this time.
• Meet with stakeholders and peers to understand and prioritize needs.
• Programming new product features, upgrading existing functionality, and updating dependencies and pipelines.
• Performing code review async via pull request or synchronously via Zoom.
• Validating application functionality through the use of both automated and manual testing.
• Pairing with another engineer to trade experience or collaborate on a particular challenge. (We encourage pairing as needed and it shouldn’t be “never” but there’s no mandate.)
• Researching tools, patterns and practices relevant to current or future work.
• Writing internal documentation about technical choices, runbooks, or team practices.
• Working with your manager to discuss and implement guidance or technical coaching plans for other engineers.
• On Fridays (or an equivalent amount of time elsewhere in the week at your discretion), you’re encouraged to pursue team-agreed work that isn’t explicitly toward the product roadmap, like tool upgrades or technical research. We are purposefully targeting 20% of capacity toward maintenance work.

Core skills & experiences (You check most of these boxes)

• Building and maintaining Web SaaS products for at least 5 years (12+ is ideal).
• Advanced programming experience in a Web server context, PHP strongly preferred.
• Programming experience in JavaScript and HTML/CSS.
• Advanced SQL query authoring and relational database design constraints.
• Working remotely with a cross-functional team & collaborating with other engineers.
• Task refinement & scoping, self-organization, and prioritization.
• Team-based communication (asking for what they need and conveying challenges and timelines proactively), active listening, and consensus building.
• Giving and receiving constructive and well-communicated code review feedback.
• Experience with one or more web application frameworks, especially event-based (as in WordPress, not Kafka).
• Troubleshooting DNS and web request / server response structures.
• Validating code using test automation (unit or functional/integration).
• Controlling major sources of application complexity and managing dependencies thoughtfully.

Accretive skills (We hope you check a few of these boxes)

• Using, designing, documenting, and building REST APIs.
• Experience with WordPress (or similar).
• Experience using caching layers to improve web application performance.
• Building & improving CI pipelines (we use BitBucket).
• Evaluating application-level security and remediation of flaws.
• Evaluating & implementing accessibility requirements.
• Experience with data pipelines, feed processing, and/or data migrations.
• Working with Python (used in our data pipeline), data warehouses, and/or data visualization (We use GCP / BigQuery / Looker).
• Iterative self-directed learning is second nature to you.
• You’ve read resources or books like Will Larson’s Staff Engineer and are thoughtful about the strategic role of the Staff Engineer in an organization.

Why take this role?

• High impact, high efficiency, sustainable efforts, & minimal politics. Our entire company culture is oriented to winning together, not individual interests.
• Truly flexible work schedule with consistent effort to minimize meetings and prioritize individual needs. Unlimited PTO, 15 holidays, plus a mostly-shutdown entire final week of the year.
• Commitment to a healthy engineering culture with a focus on great documentation, team-based work refinement, and clear acceptance criteria. We’re not done improving how we work.
• We’re not just “committed to diversity”, we have a diverse & inclusive team and continue to iterate on policies that support it.
• You're aligned with our mission of improving access to career services & employment outcomes for higher education students by supporting their individual needs.
• Your 5-year plan could involve deepening your technical skills and focusing on impact as a special project “solver”, becoming the technical lead of a second product team as it forms, or transitioning into an engineering management role. (It likely does not involve becoming an overall project “architect” as that is our principal’s primary role.)

Compensation package

• $160,000 annual salary (with annual raise 1 July).
• 4-year vesting stock options
• Unlimited PTO (you must use at least 3 weeks; 4-6 is normal)
• Health insurance (Gold PPO) premium 100% covered for employee & 60% for dependents (Dental 75% for employee & 50% for dependents; Vision 75% for employee)
• 4% 401K contribution (3% full match + 2% half match)
• $600 annual home office stipend
• 12 weeks parental leave (after 1 year)
• Guaranteed remote work policy (there’s no office)

Hiring process

• Screening over email (call optional)
• 90-minute alignment interview (Zoom video)
• 90-minute functional area interview (Zoom video)
• Pre-offer stage: (1) 60-minute Meet & Greet with CEO (Zoom video), (2) 3 references (preferably all who worked directly with you for 6 months or more; 1 senior to you in your team or reporting chain)
• Background check (we do not automatically disqualify applicants for non-violent criminal convictions)

About the team

• We are fully remote, but require employees reside in the continental US or Canada due to time zones & compliance overhead.
• We employ 7 full-time engineers (Manager, 4 Application, 1 Data, 1 QA Automation) that lean senior (2 staff-level, 3 senior-level, 2 mid-level, 0 entry — yes, that’s the scale). There is 1 product manager (with plans to grow).
• No engineers have left the company in 3 years. Our principal engineer has been with the company 12 years. 
• We use a Kanban workflow in Jira (“kanban-like” if we’re being pedantic) with clear acceptance criteria and Gherkin for testing criteria.
• In 2024, half our tickets were in support of our strategic roadmap, 20% were maintenance work, and the rest were requests (support escalations and other non-roadmap work).
• We primarily build in a WordPress-based monolith with a few ancillary AWS services.
• We have managed hosting, so there is no on-call rotation, but as a staff engineer you will be on the short-list of emergency technical contacts. (We had zero emergencies in 2024.)
• Two years ago, we had zero automated tests. Today, we have more than 500 (300 of which are E2E) and will aggressively increase that number this year, focusing on PHP integration tests in a specific section of the product.
• We’re publishing our interview plan, onboarding impact plan, and performance review criteria for this role. Our small team works best by being engaged, taking ownership, and exercising critical thinking every day. This role is critical to continuing and expanding that strategy, so consider coming to your interviews with good questions.
• West coasters beware: Standup is 10:30am ET (Mon-Thu; we don’t have standing meetings on Fridays). It is our team’s only standing meeting (besides 1:1s with your manager and monthly All Hands).

What will your 90-day onboard look like?

• Weeks 1: Meet people, read docs, complete training, set up your localhost, ask questions. We’re not a “commit code on day 1” shop; relax & adapt. Check in with your manager daily.
• Weeks 2-4: Dig into team’s current problem set and how you can start contributing now, while also learning medium- and long-term goals to start aligning decisions with them. Join the team’s workflow and complete prioritized work. Check in with your manager a few times a week.
• Months 2-3: Take work that aligns with your learning goals to quickly expand your exposure to various parts of the product and stack. Make strong contributions, but more biased toward learning than highest priority, tapering back toward priority-based work toward the end of 90-days at the pace that makes sense. Choose a longer-term 1:1 pace.

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