Posted: May 20, 2011

Job Title: Lead Software Engineer, Web Developer, Programmer
Reports to: CEO & Founder
Position Type: Full-time
Location: New Orleans, LA
Company Website: www.kickboardforteachers.com

Summer 2011 Press:
• Businessweek Most Promising Social Entrepreneurs 2011: http://images.businessweek.com/slideshows/20110621/america-s-most-promising-social-entrepreneurs-2011/slides/8
• Inc. 30 Under 30: http://www.inc.com/30under30/2011/profile-jennifer-schnidman-medbery-founder-of-drop-the-chalk.html

Job Description:

Kickboard is the world's most innovative data-management application for classrooms.

Think of what Trac/Jira/FogBugz did for software development, except that instead of documenting bugs and managing tickets, teachers use Kickboard to keep track of student grades, skill mastery, behavior, and family communication in order to make smarter instructional decisions.

Our talented development team is growing – we are looking for a senior engineer who is versatile, experienced, and interested in working in a small company atmosphere with a focus on collaboration and continuous improvement.

Kickboard is the flagship web application built by Drop the Chalk, Inc. The company founder and CEO is a software engineer and computer scientist who spent several years as a middle and high school teacher, where the need for Kickboard was discovered through first-hand experience. This means that engineers who have a passion for designing highly useful products are very welcome at Kickboard. Our goal, and your goal as senior software engineer, is to design elegant, powerful, and reliable software to get teachers to abandon legacy student information systems and incorporate modern data analysis into classroom instruction with Kickboard.

Drop the Chalk is a venture-backed startup with investors and advisors who are veterans of the education technology industry. We have been the recipient of numerous awards including the Tulane New Day Challenge, Domain Companies Challenge, Idea Village Challege, MassChallenge Finalist, Unreasonable Institute Finalist, Echoing Green finalist, and First Growth Venture Network.

We are located in the Central Business District of New Orleans in a vibrant walkable section of town close to restaurants, coffee shops and bars. Our developers take an active role in growing the hacker community here as organizers and members of several meetups and tech events.

The salary range for this position is $75,000 to $85,000, based on experience. We also offer stock options, flexible work hours, group health care plan, 15 days of paid time off and 9 company holidays. This being New Orleans and all, we also boast the best company-sponsored lunch and dinner outings in the country.

Job Description

You’ll enjoy the freedom to innovate and have your work seen by thousands of (paying!) customers. We use an agile development methodology and take customer feedback seriously. You will own the back-end infrastructure and ensure its reliability and scalability as we grow. You'll take the lead on solving hard problems: designing and optimizing a predictive analytics engine, efficient data caching and data visualization, writing a domain specific language are just a few of our current toughest problems.

The server side application is written in PHP using Zend Framework, with plenty of Javascript, jQuery, and AJAX on the client side. Ability to design and understand database schema diagrams and write SQL code is a must. Appreciation for UI/UX detail is critical – you'll work closely with talented front end designers.

To get hired, you’ll need professional experience and solid references. We protect our culture and team and will only consider people who will prosper in this environment.
Working in our New Orleans office is a requirement – face-to-face team meetings and "user observation field trips" to customer schools are the main reasons why we are able to iterate so quickly.

Desired Domains of Expertise

We don’t expect you to have all of this experience, but please make sure to highlight any of these skills in your cover letter and add more details as appropriate in your resume.

1. MVC 2. Zend Framework 3. Domain specific languages 4. High availability 5. Automated testing 6. Trac

Application Procedure

Before applying, visit www.kickboardforteachers.com to learn more about the software and our business model. If you meet the outlined requirements and are interested in the position, please send the following to jobs@dropthechalk.com:

1. Cover letter (as body of the email) that discusses your most important skills that match this job description. 2. Resume (as attachment to email) 3. Put “Engineer” in the subject line of your email (otherwise your application may get lost)

Drop the Chalk, Inc. is an Equal Opportunity Employer.