Staff Software Engineer @ Braven, Inc - Chicago, IL

Location: Atlanta (GA), Chicago (IL), Newark (NJ), or New York City (NYC)

Employment Type: Full-time

Start Date: ASAP

To Apply: Submit your application here. Send any questions to [email protected] (Please send any questions about this role to: [email protected])

About Braven

We believe that the next generation of leaders will emerge from everywhere. We empower promising college students with the skills, confidence, experiences, and networks necessary to transition from college to strong first jobs, which lead to meaningful careers and lives of impact.

Learn more about Braven’s impact:

https://impactreport.bebraven.org/

https://jobsreport.bebraven.org/

Braven was named one of America’s Best Startup Employers 2022 by Forbes! We’re proud to be a nonprofit organization that values its employees and has always been committed to building a diverse, equitable, and inclusive workplace that mirrors our country.

The Role

Braven is entering into a new phase of exponential growth and an exciting opportunity to concretely advance the economic mobility of 80,000-100,000 Fellows in the near future. Braven is seeking a Staff Software Engineer to join us in building online experiences, tools, and services to help students get strong first jobs.

You will join a small and empowered team to do big things by focusing on the user experience and will play a crucial role in our mission: prototyping new features, helping peers grow through code reviews, learning new technologies, and re-architecting systems that have passed their expiration date. This role will be a member of the Systems team and reports to the CTO.

To be successful at Braven, on the Systems Team, and in this role, you must demonstrate Braven’s core values, be comfortable with ambiguity and constant evolution, and welcome constant feedback and learning.

What You’ll Do

• Work primarily with a Rails stack on Docker images deployed across Heroku.
• Be expected to be proactive by identifying opportunities to improve our infrastructure and communicate those priorities to your manager and your scrum leader.
• Fully own the features on which you are working, demonstrating a large locus of control in which you talk to stakeholders, align on requirements, and gather feedback quickly and efficiently.
• Take initiative to help identify what needs to be done and help push everyone towards increased clarity and alignment.
• Use knowledge of software engineering best practices to transform our processes, systems, and code to be more robust and maintainable, reducing the surface area of our code so that we can keep a lean engineering team.
• Promptly review code for other software engineers on the team, seeing and taking mentorship opportunities as they arise.
• Balance complex requirements and goals with pragmatism (YAGNI, DRY, KISS, etc)
• Demonstrate a mastery of computer science fundamentals and design patterns (OOP, SOLID, data structures, MVC, REST, etc)
• Keep the end-user front and center in everything you do - elegant code is great, but real impact on students’ lives is better

Who You Are

Minimum Qualifications

• 7+ years of software engineering experience

• Intermediate knowledge of Ruby on Rails

Preferred Qualifications & Competencies

• Experience on teams that provide software solutions at scale
• Experience with agile project management
• Comfort and experience collaborating closely with product managers, designers, and quality assurance analysts providing estimates or product ideas to influence the roadmap
• Have a mentality where you leave it better than you found it, be unafraid to refactor and improve code you didn’t write
• Be forward looking, writing reliable code that you or others can easily comprehend and modify 6+ months down the road
• Be autonomous and self-driven and hold yourself ultimately accountable for team success
• Empathy is something you demonstrate and value
• Strong ability to mentor others to support their development
• Maintain emotional self-regulation in challenging or stressful circumstances, treating colleagues with respect and dignity
• Model “disagree and commit” for their team, supporting carefully-made decision even if there is disagreement
• A demonstrated commitment to diversity, equity and inclusiveness, rooted in a deep level of cultural competence and deep listening
• Deep alignment with Braven’s core values
• Your experiences have informed your belief in Braven’s mission and have prepared you to work with, or for, Braven’s student Fellow population, which is predominantly comprised of people of color from low-income backgrounds

• You have a demonstrated commitment to equity and inclusion

Please know that no one ever meets 100% of the preferred qualifications. If you meet the minimum qualifications and much of the preferred qualifications and competencies describes you, we encourage you to apply.

Additional Requirements

• Ability to work in-person in Atlanta (GA), Chicago (IL), Newark (NJ) or New York (NY)
• Authorized to work in the U.S.
• Must be fully vaccinated and have received the booster vaccination against COVID-19 and provide proof of such by the date of hire. Individuals may claim exemption from the vaccine requirement for medical or religious reasons. Exempted individuals will be subject to weekly testing if they engage in any in-person work activities.

Compensation and Benefits

The salary for this position, which depends on prior work experience and our assessment of your demonstrated fit for the role, will likely be between $127,100-$158,800 in Atlanta (GA), $133,700-$167,100 in Chicago (IL), and $144,400-$180,500 in Newark (NJ) or New York (NY). Braven offers competitive base salaries based on the midpoint of the market among not-for-profit organizations of similar size, with opportunities for salary growth over time. We believe in compensating staff members fairly in relation to each other, their qualifications, and their impact on behalf of the organization, and take internal and external equity seriously. Given our commitment to equity, Braven does not negotiate salary offers; instead each salary offer is determined carefully using external and internal benchmarking. You will have an opportunity to discuss salary in more detail after you begin the application process.

Braven also provides competitive, comprehensive benefits, recognition, and career development. While Braven reserves the right to change benefits at any time, current benefits include:

• Unlimited vacation time in addition to org-wide, week-long shutdowns in July and the end of the calendar year
• Match of your 401K contribution up to 5% of your base annual salary, starting your first full month
• Coverage of 85% of health insurance premium
• A one-month paid sabbatical after 4 years on staff

Location

We gather in the office two to three days a week. Therefore, we require teammates to live within commuting distance of one of our hubs: Chicago, New York City, Newark, and Atlanta. Each teammate can use at least two flex days per week of their choosing to work remotely. We believe in the magic, connection, and collaboration that happens when people work together face-to-face and we believe in giving people flexibility to focus, balance personal priorities, and save themselves two commutes per week.

Commitment to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion

At Braven, we are committed to attracting, engaging, developing, and retaining a diverse team. Braven operates in the context of our American culture, against the backdrop of systemic racism and oppression of marginalized people since our country’s founding. We are committed to assembling leaders at our organization who have emerged from everywhere, with a particular emphasis on those who share the racial and income backgrounds of our Fellows, and creating an inclusive culture that allows all teammates, of all experiences and identities, to thrive.

Braven is an equal opportunity employer and considers qualified applicants for employment without regard to race, color, creed, religion, national origin, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity and expression, age, disability, veteran status, or any other protected factor. We encourage talented individuals of all backgrounds to apply.