The Role:

As a Senior Software Engineer for Recommendations, you’ll drive high-level technology decisions as well as day-to-day development on the team that’s building Newsela’s content recommendation engine. You’ll focus on deeply understanding the pedagogical needs of teachers and students, and executing on a technical plan for how to improve the predictive power of our recommendation tools. You’ll be creating data pipelines and working in Prefect to help the build models and surface recommended content within the platform. Reporting to the Director of Search and Recommendations, you’ll work closely with our Data Science and Product Management teams to set the strategy for content recommendations.

Why You’ll Love This Role:

You’ll have the opportunity to collaborate with leadership and our Data Science and Product Management teams to help shape the future of K-12 education to deliver varying types of content for teachers, students, school districts to support learning outcomes. Using cutting edge techniques to build our recommendations engine, your work will directly impact our platform’s ability to serve the content teachers and students are looking for, and enable discovery of engaging, relevant content that further enriches the learning experience in K-12 classrooms nationwide. And because we're a technology company focused on improving the way students learn, you’ll be part of an engineering culture that values teaching, learning, and questioning.

Why We’ll Love You:

You have 2+ years of building and improving recommendation and/or personalization systems on a web-based platform, and 3+ years with demonstrated competency in our tech stack (Python), ETL, and data engineering. You’ve built successful systems that dynamically surface content to a user based on inferences about that user. You understand web service architecture well enough to diagnose performance bottlenecks and propose a variety of remedies. Not only do you bring a passion for data science, but you’re intensely curious and humble in the face of new information. You naturally seek out creative ways of measuring success, and meet contradictions in the data with the excitement of someone who knows they’re about to learn something new, not the resignation of someone who’s worried about being wrong. While not required, experience in any of the following is a bonus: AWS SageMaker, API Development, RPC Cloud ML platforms like AWS Sagemaker, or API Development (REST, GraphQL, or RPC).

You know how to find a shared language between product managers, data scientists, and software developers. You balance your engineering expertise with a product mindset, always digging for the underlying user and system needs, rather than simply settling for surface-level “requirements.” Your passion for complex technical problems is matched by your excitement to lead a team through large, multi-faceted technical projects. You can seamlessly distinguish and delegate responsibilities, set success criteria for projects, and coach teammates with a high level of organizational awareness to ensure each team member is growing and developing professionally.

About Newsela:

One of the fastest growing tech companies in K-12 education, Newsela was founded on the principle that while every child learns differently, they all deserve a rich learning experience that ignites a love of learning. We built our platform based on learning science research to deliver the most engaging, authentic content to modernize how teaching happens in the classroom. Along with interactive assessments and tools, we provide teachers with digital content at five reading levels -- from +100 of the best sources -- that is relevant to the diverse backgrounds and interests of their students. Since we started in 2013, we’ve become an essential solution for 90% of U.S. K-12 schools and serve +25 million users.