• Job Description

  Req#: 8564e453125f

  Nurturing critical wisdom for the sake of the world

  Why should you join Minerva? The salary and benefits are competitive; the people you’ll work with are authentic, thoughtful, driven, and human; but the reason we chose Minerva is our strong belief in the company’s mission: if we want to change the world, it’s imperative that we improve education everywhere.

  As our first step to achieving that goal, we built Minerva University from the ground up, refining and improving every aspect of a traditional university. Minerva University boasts an unbiased admissions process, seminars instead of lectures, and a global experience over 4 years; and has been named the most innovative university in the world - twice. Now, we are expanding our reach and impact by partnering with emerging and established higher education institutions around the world.

  Our methodology, which emphasizes active class participation, deliberate practice, and other empirically-proven methods is enabled by Minerva Forum. Built to address the central educational challenges of the modern era, Minerva Forum embodies the leading research on the science of learning to enable the rapid development of sophisticated, durable skills based programs.

  We need your help to build the next generation of Minerva Forum. You’ll be part of a small and nimble team that works in close consultation with other teams—including product management, design, marketing, academic, and company leadership. We’re big on collaboration, knowledge-sharing, and cross-training; and we end every cycle with a retrospective, so if something’s not working for us, we fix it. Over the medium term, you will receive significant mentoring, feedback, and deliberate career development.

  We are still growing. There are plenty of high-value and challenging green field projects. We are also shifting many projects from prototypes and MVPs to thoughtfully designed long-lived systems. This is an opportunity to do interesting and important work, and to do it right.

  Many of our engineers have been with us for years, and those who leave often come back. For many of us, this is the best job we’ve ever had. It gives us a chance to build something long-lasting, leave a legacy, and add meaning to our career.

  We hope you will join us as we figure out what’s next.

  Responsibilities

  1. Design, implement, and manage infrastructure solutions on AWS, ensuring high availability, scalability, and security.
  2. Deploy and manage containerized applications using Kubernetes.
  3. Create and maintain infrastructure as code using Terraform to automate provisioning and scaling of resources.
  4. Manage and optimize databases including MySQL, Redis, and MongoDB.
  5. Collaborate with development teams to streamline CI/CD pipelines for efficient and reliable software deployments.
  6. Monitor and troubleshoot production systems, proactively identifying and resolving issues.
  7. Implement best practices for security, compliance, and data protection.
  8. Participate in on-call rotation to provide 24/7 support for critical infrastructure components.
  9. Stay up-to-date with industry trends and emerging technologies to drive continuous improvement.

  Technologies, tools, and processes

  We value your ability to learn quickly, make thoughtful tradeoffs, and build maintainable systems, over your past experience with specific technologies. That said, here are some of the tools, frameworks and providers that we use:

  • AWS and MongoDB Atlas as our cloud providers.
  • Terraform for managing our infrastructure resources.
  • Kubernetes, kustomize, helm, and docker for packaging and running our applications.
  • GitHub, CircleCI, codecov, Rollbar, and DataDog for building, reviewing, testing, shipping, and monitoring our systems. (Underlying codebase is primarily Django + React and TypeScript.)
  • Slack for collaborating with local and remote coworkers, for integrating code review, deployment, and infrastructure notifications into a social space, and for sharing important GIFs and pet photos.

  We value empathy, candor, substantive feedback, fast iteration loops, and openness to experimentation over a specific software development process.

  Here are some tools we use to plan, calibrate, and organize:

  • Use the unit of an “episode” to align planning and goal-setting across teams. Each episode is 3 months long, and is broken up into 4 3-week cycles for shorter term focus.
  • Plan high-level development themes at the beginning of each episode.
  • Plan tactically at the beginning of each cycle.
  • Run mini design sprints to design, prototype, and test ideas.
  • Gather at a weekly team meeting to reflect on the past week and discuss priorities and collaboration for the coming week.
  • Check in through a daily asynchronous standup in Slack to foster accountability, remove blockers, and keep others updated.
  • Conduct cross-functional blameless retrospectives twice per episode.
  • Organize structured peer feedback sessions twice per year.
  • Support each other giving internal brown-bag technical talks.

  Benefits

  • Mission-oriented team and organization
  • Sustainable working pace
  • Unlimited vacation policy
  • Excellent healthcare coverage for US residents and comparable healthcare stipend globally
  • Generous paid parental leave: 12 weeks for moms and 6 weeks for dads
  • Competitive salary and stock compensation

  Equal Employment Opportunity

  To build a university for 21st century leaders and creators, our team should be representative of our diverse student body. Minerva values a diverse workplace and strongly encourages women, people of color, LGBTQIA individuals, people with disabilities, members of ethnic minorities, foreign-born residents, and veterans to apply. Minerva is an equal opportunity employer. Applicants will not be discriminated against because of any characteristic irrelevant to creating great software, including: race, color, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, age, religion, national origin, disability, ancestry, marital status, veteran status, medical condition or any protected category prohibited by local, state or federal laws.

  How To Apply

  Interested? We make applying quick and easy. Please provide:

  • A copy of your resume or a link to something resume-like (e.g., your website, LinkedIn)
  • Other links you'd like us to see (e.g., blog, GitHub, a project of yours)
  • A brief description of why you are excited for this opportunity to join Minerva. This description replaces the traditional cover letter.

• About the company

  Minerva Project is an educational organization that designs and delivers educational programs through educational and corporate partners globally.

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