Software Engineer III

Annual salary: $90,000 - $115,000

Special Instructions to Applicants : Please attach a cover letter and a resume in the Supporting Documents section of the application. Please make sure to include employment dates on the resume in Month/ Year format.

Position Summary

OpenStax (part of Rice University) is a non-profit textbook publisher, learning software producer, and platform for learning research. Our mission is to provide every student and instructor with free access to high-quality teaching and learning resources that help them succeed in their educational journey. We have created a library of more than 50 free and openly licensed college textbooks that have served millions of students across the globe, resulting in over one billion dollars in savings. We have created additional software and course materials to help students read with more engagement and practice more effectively, incorporating our research team’s expertise in cognitive science and machine learning. OpenStax seeks to become an organization that continuously strives to learn, reflect, and make actionable better policies and practices for diversity, equity, and inclusivity at work and in education.

We are embarking on an ambitious and exciting strategic initiative to create a unified OpenStax experience for the faculty and students that use our textbooks and learning tools. We are creating a compelling student experience for our entire library that generates meaningful data that we can use to improve student performance and learning. This new platform will also serve as the hub for learning research, where we can discover what learning strategies best serve students given their individual differences (personalization) and then turn those discoveries into practical benefits for students.

OpenStax is seeking a talented and experienced Software Engineer III. The Software Engineer III will work with the product manager, contractors, and team developers to architect, design, implement, and maintain OpenStax’s suite of online textbooks, learning, and assessment software used for research and product development. The Software Engineer III will design software components and application programming interfaces (APIs) to develop a web-based reading and learning service that ingests learner interaction data, runs an ever-expanding suite of cognitive-science best practice algorithms and machine learning algorithms (in near-real time and in batch processes), and returns the recommendations and analytics produced by those algorithms to client learning platforms, as well as associated components such as editing tools, assessment and interaction data databases, etc.

The Software Engineer III executes all programming tasks, including programming, analyzing, designing, developing, implementing, modifying, and maintaining computer programs. In addition, this individual works on systems of moderate size and complexity or segments of larger systems.

The Software Engineer (SE) III will contribute towards the design and implementation of a greenfield system which will serve as the foundation for an exciting new initiative. The individual will leverage open source systems and technologies to help build a cloud-based platform that will serve higher education students, learning researchers, and educators, with the goal of supporting tens of thousands of active users in an accelerated time frame. The SE III will join a team responsible for the full lifecycle management of the platform including application development and operations, and will have frequent contact with staff researchers, UX personnel, and developers. This team is driving change at a pivotal phase of our evolution, as we develop a new research platform that will help researchers better understand how students learn in a digital learning environment and optimize the learning experience to meet the individual needs of the students.
In addition to writing code, this position requires reviewing other developers’ work, contributing towards architecture and design decisions, participating in the estimation and specification of new work, and mentoring more junior developers.

We celebrate diversity of all kinds and we are committed to nurturing an inclusive environment. We seek to hire, develop, and retain talented people from all backgrounds. We are part of a private university, but our team comes from a variety of backgrounds and includes people who attended universities and community colleges, as well as people who did not graduate from college.

Ideal candidates should have strong knowledge of at least one programming language and expertise with front-end development using React. The ability to recognize and recommend needed changes in operational procedures is also important.

Benefits at a Glance: Benefits & Compensation .

Essential Functions

• Conceptualizes design, implement, and develop solutions for complex system/programs independently
• Works with a variety of users to gain information, and develops intra-system tradeoffs between different users, as necessary
• Interacts with a diverse client base and outside vendor contacts
• Documents system builds and application configurations
• Maintains and updates documentation as needed
• Provides technical analysis, design, development, conversion, and implementation work
• Provides production system support and issue resolution
• Works as a project leader, as needed, for projects of moderate complexity
• Serves as a technical resource for applications
• Compares, evaluates, and implements new features and technologies, and integrates them into the computing environment
• Mentors lower level developer/programmer
• Performs all other duties as assigned

Required Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree
• Five (5) years of software engineering experience
• Expertise in designing, developing, testing, and deploying applications
• Proficiency with application design and data modeling
• Strong communication skills with both technical and non-technical clients
• Ability to lead activities on structured team development projects
• Ability to select, adapt, and effectively use a variety of programming methods
• Knowledge of application domain

Preferred Qualifications

• Master’s degree in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, other quantitative fields, or equivalent work experience
• Expertise with Python and/or Ruby
• Experience with JavaScript web-development frameworks
• Experience developing for and using cloud computing services like Amazon Web Services (AWS)
• Experience developing and using APIs
• Experience with continuous integration and automated testing
• Experience with git
• Experience with agile software development practices
• Experience with backend software development
• Current knowledge of the latest software and design techniques
• Ability to define and solve logical problems for technical applications
• Knowledge of and ability to select, adapt, and effectively use a variety of programming methods
• Ability to recognize and recommend needed changes in user and/or operations procedures
• Basic knowledge of software engineering principles
• Strong knowledge of at least one programming language

Rice University is an Equal Opportunity Employer with commitment to diversity at all levels, and considers for employment qualified applicants without regard to race, color, religion, age, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national or ethnic origin, genetic information, disability or protected veteran status.

Current Rice University COVID policies, which include vaccination, face mask, testing, gatherings, occupancy limits, and travel policies can be found here: https://coronavirus.rice.edu/policies