We're a small, high-performing, diverse, tight-knit team with a mission to radically improve mainstream science education at schools. By creating the best science lessons in the world, coupled with intuitive tools that allow teachers to take advantage of the latest pedagogies, we’ve already helped millions of students in Australia get excited about science.
Young people all over the world deserve a world-class science education. Stile is on a mission to ensure that students are able to critically evaluate what they see in their social media feeds, and feel confident using science and technology to solve the big issues of tomorrow. Every week over 250,000 students and their teachers use Stile’s web platform to explore and analyse the science behind the big issues facing us globally, a number we expect will more than double in the next couple of years as we expand internationally.
Stile is used in 1 in 3 Australian secondary schools, with around 45% of year 7-10 students subscribed. That’s quite some reach, and it’s a responsibility we take extremely seriously. When you join our small team, you have a unique opportunity to have a massive impact on the future of science education.
Solve Important Problems
We need your help! We’re looking for exceptional engineers who want to solve interesting problems alongside brilliant people.
The Platform Team is responsible for reliability, security, delivery costs and performance, as well as for the sophisticated suite of CI development tooling that empowers all Stile engineers to rapidly test and safely deploy new features many times each day. Stile's infrastructure is all managed through Terraform, run in Docker containers, deployed automatically through CD pipelines, and auto-scaled minute-by-minute to match our traffic patterns - running Stile is a hands-free experience.
As a Platform Team member you will first and foremost be a great software engineer. You'll be charged with architecting and delivering robust software to automate and scale solutions for many different problems across the team's various responsibilities.
As the team's new Cost Efficiency Lead, your focus will be on optimising delivery costs, in particular AWS expenses. You will be expected to innovate and execute on a cost-savings roadmap, build investigation and monitoring tools to track down anomalies, dive into our hourly billing data to hunt for patterns, and provide consultation to other engineers on how to optimise their designs. Your work will touch many areas of the application and infrastructure, giving you an excellent grounding in the overall tech stack used at Stile.
Overall, you will be responsible to one key metric - bringing the bill within budget and keeping it there. You will be supported in achieving that goal, but ultimately have a great deal of autonomy in how you get there provided the number is heading in the right direction.
If you're an AWS expert who likes clearly defined responsibilities and autonomy, then this is the job for you!
Oncall
All platform team members participate in a 24-7 oncall roster. Shifts are two weeks long, and typically occur about twice per quarter (once as primary, and once as backup). Incidents outside of business hours are rare, and team members on-call outside of hours receive an extra week of annual leave per year as compensation for being available. Additionally, team members are expected to take time-in-lieu within the week if significant work is needed outside of business hours.
Do your best work
We make sure that our engineers time isn't wasted. We provide:
- A highly-motivated and talented team with experienced engineers, and passionate new starters.
- A genuine commitment to the professional development of each engineer through training, coaching, mentorship opportunities, regular feedback and increasing responsibility.
- Quality over quantity: we're pragmatists, but we already have an established business that's here for the long term, so maintenance matters more than up-front build time. We'd rather build it right than live with something broken.
- A near-continuous release cadence, involvement of engineers in the design process, and a willingness to take calculated risks.
- A large base of real customers, which is growing rapidly as we expand overseas. When you ship a feature 100,000 students will see it within the next day.
- Enormous respect for our employees’ work-life balance reflected in our parental leave policy, individual flexibility and sustainable project pace.
- A mission that drives our company, and a strong sense of ethics in everything we do.
- A modern tech stack. AWS. Terraform. Rust for tooling. CI on Buildkite. An API written in Ruby and Sorbet (not Rails), with a frontend in React and Typescript, glued together with Protobuf interfaces.
- Great documentation.
- A culture of asking ‘how should this work?’ rather than ‘what's easiest?’.
- Extremely thorough test coverage, extensive use of live configuration and feature switching, and a rigorous CI and merge queue process that delivers provably working code rapidly.
- High standards: we love solutions that Just Work, and are prepared to spend the effort to build them. However, we live by the Agile principle of valuing working software over comprehensive documentation.
- Our comprehensive suite of observability tools let's you see how your changes are performing, and gives you the detail you need to spot trends, anomalies, and patterns easily.
- You’ll be given the resources and guidance you need to grow your career. We’ll provide you with transparency around expectations, promotion and pay, and opportunities to lead. You’ll attend conferences, and internal and external professional development events. Your manager will be an experienced engineer, dedicated to helping you succeed.
- Stile is owned and led by engineers. Our CEO, CTO, and founder/majority-owner/chair — Alan Finkel — are all engineers, and understand what it takes to build something great. Great engineering gets noticed, and rewarded
About You
- You're a critical thinker who sees the system as a whole, and finds ways to cut to the core of the issue.
- You think about systems, not just details - you consider how data flows, how to handle API errors, and how to make the next iteration easier to develop than the previous. Furthermore, you consider the ways that other developers might interact with your code and anticipate gotchas. After shipping a product, you think about how to monitor its performance and improve it further based on feedback.
- You know that sometimes "more tech" isn't the answer. You love thinking about people, processes, and systems for continuous improvement, and use a balance of technology and people skills to have a huge impact.
- You naturally put yourself in others shoes and solve problems with their perspective at the top of your mind.
- You seek to understand your teammates rather than win today's argument. You win hearts and minds with carefully considered opinions, and know that success comes from having a whole team working together well. You raise up your peers' voices and enjoy nothing more than seeing your teammates succeed.
- You have a strong desire to improve things around you rather than just getting the job done. That said, you know that value exists only once it's shipped and are pragmatic about delivering results.
- There will never be enough time to do everything. You think about the value of competing projects and priorities, and enjoy finding the balance between things that are urgent today, and things that will set us up for success in the longer term.
- You're confident working independently with the tools you know, but appreciate opportunities to learn, know when to reach out for help, and love to help others.
- It doesn't matter if you're missing experience with our tech stack as long as you can show a track record of picking things up quickly.
Life at Stile
We’re here to build something real and enduring. A company that in years to come we look back on and are proud of what we achieved, and how we achieved it. So, what’s it like working with us?
- Colleagues worth working with.
You’ll join an amazing 70-strong team of teachers, scientists, artists, and engineers. We hold ourselves, and each other, to a high standard, and love what we do. - Work on something that really matters.
In partnership with teachers, we’re coaching students to become problem solvers and critical thinkers. We believe that with a strong command of science, tomorrow’s citizens and leaders are set up to sort the misinformation from the facts. - Support always.
Stile is its people, and it’s important we are creating an environment where you’re supported, happy and able to do your best work. We have strong management and feedback frameworks, and a great benefits program check it out here Stile benefits - A fantastic office environment.
When we can, we spend time in the office. It has a huge central kitchen, lots of places to put your feet up to work and even end of trip facilities if you ride in. - Flexibility.
We expect that you work hard, but you’ll have flexible hours and you’re the master of your own schedule. - Your own professional development.
We’re lifelong learners here at Stile. Alongside teaching you everything you need to know to succeed in this role, we provide a generous PD allowance.
Hours and location
Our head office is located in the ‘paris end’ of Melbourne CBD. Overall we’re an “in-person” culture (we enjoy working together face to face), but we’re also flexible with a mix of working from home and the office, once you settle in.
Sound interesting?
Great! We want to know more about you, so click apply, and provide the following to show you’re great at following the details.
- A cover letter addressed to Daniel Rodgers-Pryor (no more than a page) explaining why you would smash an engineering role at Stile out of the park. Include a paragraph on which Behaviours of an Effective Stile-ist most resonate with you or which you disagree with and why.
- Your resume
Got questions about our hiring process? You can find the answers here. We can't wait to hear from you!
