Software Developer (Intermediate Senior)
Altus Assessments, Canada
Job Description
Our Purpose:
We are here to create a world served by exceptional professionals. Our products (Casper, Snapshot, and Duet) help higher education institutions to look beyond book smarts, seeing a clearer, more holistic view of applicants. It’s used by 360+ academic partners in Canada, US, Australia (and growing!) with 150,000+ applicants taking the test each year, and covers 90% of all US medical school applicants. We also host the Admissions Summit, an annual 2-day conference, and power the Alo Grant, an annual $100,000 research fund.
The Role:
We are looking to add another member onto our development team who can help with the development of projects we have in place, is willing to mentor their colleagues, and put in practices that can improve our development life cycle. You must be driven and forthcoming of ideas that can make our processes more efficient. You should be able to think critically and help drive the development from both a product and architecture perspective. We are looking for someone who is excited and determined to make code writing easier and faster. You are willing to lead, train, and collaborate with developers and members on understanding our software development life cycle. We encourage all our team members to make mistakes, but more importantly learn from them and share their learnings.
You will slot into our development team, working to push code into production that enhances our current applications, as well as helping us to make new applications a reality. You will also have the opportunity to work with the other teams at Altus. For example, you will work alongside the product team to understand the business logic and operations team in order to understand practices placed in our current environments. You will be writing code, mostly in javascript, and using services such as Heroku and AWS to deliver changes.
This is a full-time role, ideally located in Ontario but open to other parts of Canada. We are a remote-first company but will return to a limited office presence in Toronto post-Covid to accommodate employees that want/need an office.
To begin with:
In the first month, you will immerse yourself in learning business logic and applications surrounding the business. More importantly, you will be getting on-boarded for a better understanding of the ecosystems of our development cycle; this is vital. Over the next two months, you would transition into picking up tickets for development and working with the team members in sprints. You will participate in sprint grooming, sprint planning, and sprint retros to discuss and evaluate the dynamics of our sprint cycle.
In 12 months:
- You have a good understanding of our ecosystem. You can write production-quality code with tests and are consistently contributing to the development process. More importantly, you are able to advise on improvements and, possibly, on the vision of what’s next for the team.
- You are known for your customer-first approach to the development of our product. You execute on the vision and deliver a smoother process of development for our development cycle. You are able to lead other members into understanding and analyzing processes and what makes our team more efficient.
- You showcase your entrepreneurial spirit by rolling up your sleeves to get the job done with constant experimentation - you find ways to improve the development process, the team, and the company!
- You are known as a curious person - when you find something that you don’t understand, or is behaving oddly, you dig into why
- You are known to have a bias towards action and are constantly pushing us to do better and move faster. You are able to write well-tested code for tickets on time, understand the software development life cycle and have experience with SDLC amp; AGILE styles of development
- You are trusted as an advocate for our development processes. If things, or processes, are broken or slow, you are willing to put time and effort into fixing them, and demonstrate curiosity into knowing what root cause of the issues are
- You are a champion of cross-functional meetings, workshops that drive collaboration, proper prioritization, and best practices. You actively share your ideas with the team on ways we can make the development process faster and more efficient.
- You are a source of knowledge and mentorship. You take ownership in sharing what you learn with other team members to help them improve, as well as with the broader Altus team.
- You are highly regarded as a lifelong learner. You are interested in personal growth but also encouraging the growth of other team members' skill sets. You pair with other team members to understand the business logic: why our web apps function the way they do, and you work together to find ways to make t