UI/Frontend Engineer (React)

Who we're looking for:

• Someone who is looking for growth and cares about pushing themselves to achieve
• Someone who has product sensibilities - we move fast and depend on developers to make judgment calls according to convention and the principle of least surprise and to know when to escalate when they're not clear on expected busines logic.
• Someone who has design sensibilities - we have a strong component library that helps fill in many gaps. While some work we do is from high fidelity designs, we value the ability of FE developers to make design decisions and ship production code off of low fidelity mockups so we can go faster!
• Someone who is pragmatic and critical with their use of AI tools-- we care about both your fundamentals without the assistance of AI and your ability to harness it and will evaluate both in our hiring process. The AI/prompt-based stuff is pretty quickly learnable, so we will weight our evaluation to understand your human technical abilities more.

About us and how we work:

SchooLinks is an ed-tech company changing how students explore and pursue their post-high school goals. We have over 80 tools for students and school staff, including college application management, course planning, financial situations, personality assessments, college profiles, and many others.

We're looking for an experienced Front-End React Software Engineer who will design and implement high-quality front-end code as part of the SchooLinks platform

Developers who have been successful in this role have the ability to understand problems and data at a conceptual level. You should be comfortable and excited about a fast-paced environment. We want to be clear that we're a high-performance team with high expectations.

What you'll do:

• Ship clean, readable, and maintainable React code
• Contribute and proactively elevate the quality of our codebase by writing tests and addressing technical debt
• Work with a talented team of engineers, designers, and product people who have shipped 50+ features in the last 2 years and have established SchooLinks as a company that has found product-market fit and transitioned us into a hyper-growth phase.
• Participate in the product development process from start to finish, reviewing requirements and user stories to provide timely and meaningful feedback.
• Design and build solutions that will scale to millions of users

Requirements

• At least 4 years of experience shipping production-quality FE code and at least a year using React
• Experience with react-query, Redux, Material UI, and Storybook
• Excellent written and spoken English communication
• You are not comfortable just building what you're told... specifically, you must be comfortable taking ownership over technical decisions about code structure, and tooling, and be interested in the actual product you're working on
• Experience building complex and modern UIs that require a strong understanding of the underlying business logic
• Past work writing tested code and doing test-driven development
• FE Architecture planning abilities and experience

Screening Process:

Use AI and LLMs only when directed, please. It's okay to not know all the answers- we prefer that rather than you misrepresenting what you're actually comfortable with

0. Application and Resume screen - we pay special attention to the questions that we're having you answer and look at these in conjunction with your resume. Please do not answer "yes" to the questions about minimum experience if they don't apply to you-- we'll still consider you if you don't meet minimum bars, but if your answers are inconsistent with your resume, we won't look so kindly on that!

1. Recorded Video Screen -- If we think based on your application and resume that you'd potentially be a good fit, we will send you a link to a program that asks you some questions about yourself and React/FE development. This video will go to our engineering leads/engineering leadership to watch and decide if they'll take you through the interview process. The recording takes less than 15 min. If you're curious about our rationale for including this interview recording step in our process, you can read more here.

2. Live fit and technical discssion - with an engineering lead. Trying to get your background, understand your resume, the type of work you graviate too and some of your technical experience. We will ask some technical questions, but no prep is needed.

3. Live Coding Challenge - We'll have you make a simple React app from scratch by building a simple UI and making requests to an API we provide credentials for. For this activity, the majority of the time we will expect you to share screen and implement the code yourself. You can consult LLMs and other resources for reference, but we're looking to see how self-sufficient you are and what your knowledge of the tools is, too, so please bear that in mind. Time-permitting, you can showcase your own workflow for code gen, but we view this as a bit more of a "nice to have" than essential for the purpose of this screen.

4. Live Requirement Planning Challenge- We will give you designs + requirements and a series of questions about your understanding of the designs and implied business logic. Then we will ask you to write out your planning with us to come up with a proposal of how you would implement the feature.

FAQs

• What is the team size we'll be working with?
• You'll be working within one of our pods of 4-5 engineers, a designer, an engineering lead/manager, and a QA engineer
• Product and Engineering is ~45 people
• What tools does your team use?
• AI: Cursor
• FE: React, React-query, some redux, but moving away from it and making more use of hooks and component state, webpack, material UI and storybook
• BE: Django, DRF, Celery, MySQL, Redis
• Libraries (a couple of libraries we use a lot-- but there are MANY more):
• MUI, Nivo, Final Form,
• Sentry
• AWS, Jenkins for builds
• Github, Jira, Slack, Notion, Loom
• What does your company/product do?
• College and Career Readiness software that we sell to school districts. The tool is for students, staff, guardians, and community members. Learn more at schoolinks.com

• Tell us about your general working style
• Remote first engineering culture - spread across timezones
• Asynchronous - we try to get as much communication into structured formats as possible -- PRs, documentation, comments, Jira tickets vs. scheduling meetings. We do try to have the majority of our meetings around our standup to make sure that our teammates have as much focused deep work time as possible. We expect people to be consistent and transparent with their working hours to build trust and make it easier to coordinate.
• Pragmatic - we're very focused on achieving product and business goals, we try to be consistent technologically, but we don't let perfect be the enemy of good.
• Driven- our team members really believe in what we're doing and we work hard because we're personally invested in the outcome and take ownership of the work we do. Many of our team members have enture of 5+ years on the team and large portion of our leadership and management started as ICs, some as interns!
• Fast-paced - we ship A LOT of code. Universially, everyone on the team is in agreement that we're the most productive team each of us has ever been a part of, and we intend to keep things that way :)

Benefits

Competitive Salary

Part of a remote-friendly company and a fully remote team/pod

Flexible working hours and healthy asynchronous working practices

Long-term employment with considerations for promotion and raises every year. We're running a high-growth and sustainable company.

For US-based candidates:

• Full health (healthcare, vision, dental, ClassPass, etc.)
• Company 401k Program with up to 1% matching
• Competitive Salary
• Part of a remote-friendly company and a fully remote team/pod
• Long term employment with considerations for promotion and raises every 6 months
• For US-based candidates:
• Full health (healthcare, vision, dental, ClassPass, etc.)
• Company 401k Program with up to 1% matching

We presently do not have the ability to sponsor H1-B Visas.