portal resources jobs companies l learning equality full stack engineer for open source, educational software

Full Stack Engineer For Open Source, Educational Software 🔥


Hundreds of millions of children, youth, and adults around the globe lack access to quality education. Learning Equality strives to address this inequity by creating products and tools that can be adapted and contextualized to meet learning needs, with or without Internet access.

Founded as a nonprofit organization in 2013 by a group of students, Learning Equality first launched KA Lite [1], our first-generation platform which brought the Khan Academy videos and exercises offline. Learning Equality expanded on that product in 2017 to create Kolibri [2], an adaptable end-to-end suite of open-source tools, educational resources, and support materials designed for offline-first teaching and learning. We've always focused on boosting learning outcomes in some of the world's most challenging contexts, supporting disconnected learning in refugee camps, rural schools, orphanages, and out-of-school programs. To date, Kolibri has been translated into 30 languages and is being used in over 215 countries and territories.

Learning Equality is directly supporting the implementation of Kolibri with collaborators in more than 30 countries, including UN Women, Vodafone Foundation, UNICEF, and UNHCR, as well as a global network of organic adopters advocating for learning opportunities in their communities. With the support of organizations such as Google.org, the Hewlett Foundation, and the nonprofit tech accelerator Fast Forward, we are continuing to grow our products to be able to reach more communities around the world.

We are seeking a Full Stack Engineer who is interested in working on both front-end and back-end code. 

This is a position for a full-time US-based engineer who identifies strongly with Learning Equality's mission to bring quality education to under-resourced communities around the world.

About our engineers and products 

Full Stack engineers at Learning Equality build and maintain our products. All of our products use Django (Python and SQL) on the back-end and Vue (JS/HTML/CSS) on the front-end. Our code is open source on Github [3].

Products that you might work on include:

  • Kolibri Learning Platform: an offline, lightweight distributed application that learners, teachers and administrators use to interact with content. For educators, it supports differentiated instruction and personalized learning. It is also device-agnostic, running on a variety of low-cost and legacy devices.
  • Kolibri Studio: a web-based tool for curriculum management that gives users full control over the organization of their educational materials. Curriculum experts can explore pre-organized libraries of open educational resources, and bundle, tag, re-order, and distribute their content into custom channels, as well as create their own exercises and upload locally produced content.
  • Kolibri Data Portal: a central online platform for aggregation, exploration, and reporting of Kolibri learner data, to guide and support implementations involving installation of the Kolibri Application across multiple sites. The data can be aggregated through occasional connectivity of offline servers to the Internet (or via intermediary syncing devices transported between the implementation site and a location with Internet).

This position might be for you if...

  • You are a software engineer. We’re open to this role being mid-level or more senior as long as writing code in Python and Javascript is an established part of your identity and you’re excited to keep progressing along that path. 
  • You are a problem solver. You approach challenges systematically, searching for the root cause and documenting what you learn for the future. 
  • You’re a team player. When reviewing a teammate’s code or UX design you give concise and constructive feedback. You write code that is meant to be easily understood by and maintained by other contributors. 
  • You are empathetic. You understand that you are (usually) not the end-user. When you are building a feature or fixing a bug you approach it from the perspective of someone using it. At Learning Equality, this means considering a wide range of platforms and educational contexts ranging from rural classrooms to adult learners at a community center. 
  • You are a life-long learner. You’re excited by a fast-paced, collaborative environment with regular opportunities to learn and apply new skill sets.

Bonus points.

Don’t let it hold you back from applying if you don’t meet these requirements but please mention if you do! 

  • You’re familiar with some of the languages and tools that we use. While we expect new teammates to learn some new technologies on the job, proficiency with Python and Javascript is necessary.
  1. Developer Tools: Git, Github, and Zenhub
  2. Back-end: Django with Python and SQL databases
  3. Front-end: Vue, Javascript, HTML, CSS, UI and UX design
  • You are familiar with edtech or the education field. We aim to meet the needs of educators in a wide variety of learning environments; exposure to learning platforms, educational games, or direct experience as an educator would be valued. 
  • You have some experience or interest in project management. We are a small team, and play many roles in a project, including helping to manage projects in collaboration with designers, developers, and other colleagues.
  • You have experience with UX or UI. Whether or not you have formal training, you think about the experience of the end user when looking at a product. 
  • You speak multiple languages. We collaborate with partnering organizations outside of the United States and continue to translate the Kolibri platform into additional languages; fluency in any languages in addition to English would be valued.

Compensation & Benefits

Our core values guide our compensation and benefits package, just like they guide the rest of our work. We offer the following pay and benefits to US-based employees and account for similar benefits for international compensation. While we cannot sponsor visas, we are open to applicants who work from home internationally.

Salary

  • In an effort to avoid biases and address historical pay inequities, we use a consistent formula to set our team salaries. Our salary is calculated through three factors: a person's role, level of experience, and their work-from-home location. We believe in being transparent about compensation: We will calculate salary ranges based on candidate location and share during introductory conversations. 

Health 

  • We cover 100% of your and your dependents’ health insurance, including vision and dental. We have an Employee Assistance Program where you can access counseling in support of your mental health, financial wellbeing, and other life issues. 
  • We offer a monthly wellness stipend to support all aspects of your wellbeing - you can put it towards purchases like a gym subscription, a mindfulness app, or yoga classes. 

Finances

  • Learning Equality offers a 401(k) plan and contributes 3%, regardless of the amount you contribute, to help you plan for your future. 

Scheduling

  • We support flexible working schedules. We ask all teammates to make sure their working hours partially overlap with continental US time zones, for ease of collaboration, and besides that you can choose what works best for you.
  • We provide 5 weeks paid vacation, 13 paid holidays, and 4 months paid parental leave for parents of any gender, whether you’re a biological, adoptive, or foster parent.

Remote Work

  • We are a distributed team and collaborate online through Slack and video meetings, and other online communication tools. We provide up to $1000 when you start to help with your initial work from home setup, and we pay for your home internet.

Growth

  • We’re a team of life-long learners and we want you to have the workspace set up that is best for you. We budget $2,400 a year per employee to a Constant Improvement fund. You can decide whether to use this budget to upgrade your physical WFH space, purchase technological tools to support your work, continue to develop through reading or perhaps attend a webinar to learn alongside peers.

At Learning Equality we work towards a world where everyone can achieve their full potential through access to quality education. To achieve this goal we seek and support a diverse team representative of the cultures and ethnicities, genders and sexual orientations, religious beliefs and skills that are reflective of our global community of users. We are passionate about diversity because it brings strength, creativity, perspective and joy to our team. 

We welcome applicants with non-standard background for an engineering role, such as those who have transitioned from other careers or do not have an engineering degree.


  1. https://learningequality.org/ka-lite/map/
  2. https://learningequality.org/kolibri/
  3. https://github.com/learningequality

Let us send you new openings similar to Full Stack Engineer For Open Source, Educational Software straight to your Inbox. Weekly or Daily. 7-day free trial đź’Ś

The ability to work remotely increases employee happiness by 20 percent.