Senior Software Engineer (Full-stack, Ruby on Rails)

We're looking for a senior engineer experienced with the full web stack—someone who has owned production apps for many years, and loves solving user-facing product problems. As a senior engineer at Mystery Science you’ll work on all areas of the app, from front-end changes that millions of children will see, to scaling issues, to internal tools that automate our business. Engineers have a seat at the table for all decisions in the company. You’ll work alongside a strong engineering team that obsesses over customer feedback and is constantly iterating to improve based on what we hear. We release multiple updates to our website every day and implement new features days after conceiving of them. Our current stack is postgres-heroku-rails.You will report to Chris Morris, our Director of Engineering. We are headquartered in San Francisco and this position is open to both local and US-based, remote candidates.

If you’re looking for the basics:

…but the real perks of working at Mystery.org are the quality of the people on your team and the problem we’re solving. Those things are what bring us to work every day.

We started Mystery.org to create better explanations for every question children have about the world. We began with the 150 most common science questions that children ask teachers. We call this collection Mystery Science. Last year, more than 4 million children used Mystery Science in 50% of U.S. elementary schools. In an industry that is plagued by long sales cycles and high barriers to entry, we’ve sold thousands of schools without a single sales person. We’re backed by a great group of investors including Y Combinator, Learn Capital, and Reach Capital.

We’re now moving on to all the other questions children have that they’ll never learn in school. In the last 18 months we received over 500,000 questions from children eager for better explanations of the world.  Now we’re creating video explanations for every question. You can think of this like a visual Wikipedia for kids.

Our goal is to create a generation of better thinkers. We think this is the most important problem to solve in the world today.

On your first day at Mystery.org, you’ll meet a team of people who are passionate about science and teaching, and who each love their respective crafts. Our co-founder, Doug Peltz, began by assembling the best science explainers in the world from the Exploratorium, Klutz, LePort Schools, Stanford, and The Field Museum. Our focus on people extends to every area of the company. We’re building the team that we want to work with.

We are a product-driven company. The core of what we do is create an incredible product that our customers love. We test every science activity, observe every explanation with children, and talk with teachers constantly. We take our responsibility to envision the future of learning very seriously and we want to bring the best science education to every child in the world. This is an opportunity to join a startup and transform science education for the next generation of children.

If you are inspired by our mission and passionate about helping teachers succeed and transforming science education for kids, we’d like to hear from you!