WORK AT CHalk Schools

Chalk Schools is on a mission to improve school district performance through operational excellence. Our solutions enable school and district administrators to operate more efficiently and gain insight into how resources are being allocated throughout their districts. Today, we help thousands of school district staff, teachers and administrators to increase productivity, improve collaboration, gain visibility, and reduce time spent on routine paperwork in order to ensure fair and equitable use of resources both inside and outside of the classroom. 

Support, Internal Tools & Analytics Engineer

Are you passionate about solving customer issues, taking problem descriptions that are often vague and described in non-technical terms, and then driving solutions from beginning to end? Does the idea of being able to use your technical and problem solving skills to answer critical questions for the business excite you?

The Support + Internal Tools Engineer role at Chalk will allow you to play a critical role in ensuring the success of Chalk deployments in our districts and serve the needs of our business in unique and creative ways. You will interact daily with our district and school administrators, other engineers, our product and customer success teams, and pretty much anybody else with a stake in a particular customer issue. You will use your skills to help debug and solve issues wherever they may be – from broken HTML/CSS to production performance issues to needed internal tools.

You will not only immediately impact our users and internal teams on a day to day basis, but by uncovering patterns in the problems you solve, you will suggest new features or architectural changes to eliminate or reduce overall issue reoccurrence and work on tools to enable our non-technical teams to solve their own problems moving forward.

You will:

• Handle escalated support issues reported by customers and/or internal teams
• Build internal tools to enable engineering and non-technical teams at Chalk work more efficiently
• Build reports on customer and usage data to help answer critical business questions
• Debug and deploy emergency software patches, run database migrations to clean up production data, anything necessary to address critical problems
• Suggest (and possibly work on) features and architectural changes to reduce support issues
• Contribute to architecture, tools, standards and best practices for the engineering organization.

Our ideal candidate has:

• 2+ years of experience as a support or QA engineer
• Proficiency with the database console (Postgres, SQL, etc)
• Ability to think systematically and methodically to reproduce reported issues, determine their severity and propose and develop solutions to address them
• Experience and ability to analyze and understand what tasks should be one-offs handled with caution vs reoccurring issues handled via building tools
• Excellent project management skills: self-directed and capable of working effectively in an extremely fast paced environment.
• Excellent communication skills: able to facilitate your own meetings as necessary, comfortable working with all levels of the organization. Display high level of professionalism when dealing with external customers

Bonus points for:

• Experience with Rails and Ruby
• Experience with JavaScript framework experience, preferred Redux/React

What we can offer:

• Excellent healthcare coverage through TriNet including:
• Health
• Dental
• Vision
• A highly collaborative, diverse and mission-driven environment
• An opportunity to help define the future roadmap for our SaaS platform
• Beautiful and conveniently located office in SF’s Financial District

Chalk Schools is an equal opportunity employer and value diversity at our company. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability status.

Founded in 2012 out of the Learning and Design program at the Stanford Graduate School of Education, Chalk Schools is dedicated to supporting school districts to focus on what matters most - ensuring all students, teachers and administrators have access to the resources they need to succeed.  Engrained in everything we do are our four key pillars:

1. People first.
2. Work hard for inclusion.
3. Take agency and ownership.
4. Never finished, always growing.

Our commitment to equity and access extends beyond the school districts we serve. We value diversity and inclusion in every aspect of our business. Our staff is comprised of a diverse team of people from a variety of personal and professional backgrounds, but we all share a deep passion for improving the infrastructure that supports K-12 educators and leveraging technology to help underserved communities.

Chalk Schools is an equal opportunity employer. We not only value diversity but believe it is a fundamental necessity to building a successful company. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, disability status, or arrest and conviction record.