Software Engineer (Ruby on Rails)

Who we are

HopSkipDrive’s mission is to create opportunity for all through mobility. Our safe, innovative youth transportation solution is used by over 300 school districts, charter schools, government agencies and busy families to get kids where they need to go.

With nearly 500,000 yellow buses on the road every day and 3.5 billion miles driven a year, student transportation is the largest mass transit system in the US. And while districts spend $25 billion annually on transportation, only 30% of kids get to school everyday on a school bus. Add to the equation a crippling bus driver shortage and increasing needs for individualized transportation solutions, and it is clear the current system is expensive, inefficient and ripe for disruption.

We create personalized transportation solutions from one to many, and everything in between.

We’re a company with heart

Our partnerships with school districts, child welfare agencies and nonprofits ensure equitable educational access for our most vulnerable populations, including youth in foster care, youth experiencing homelessness, and youth with special needs.

We understand that the difference between struggle and success can sometimes be as simple as the ability to show up, which is why we’re on a mission to use innovative technology, coupled with operational expertise and new thinking to help kids reach their full potential by providing a safe, dependable way to get them where they are going.

We’re an awesome place to work

Our company culture has been well-recognized — HopSkipDrive has been named to Best Places to Work lists from Built in LA, Comparably, Inc. and the Los Angeles Business Journal. Comparably also named us to the Best Company for Professional Development, Best CEO and Best CEOs for Women lists.

We’re growing rapidly

Founded by three moms as a solution to their own transportation challenges, we now serve nine states and 16 markets across the country and continue to expand at a rapid pace, twice making the Inc. 5000 and Deloitte 500 Fast-Growing Technology lists. Backed by top-tier venture capital firms, HopSkipDrive has raised $70M in funding to date.

Who you are

A Rails Engineer III will enter this level capable of taking well-defined tasks and completing them in a way that is considered by the team to be high-quality with supervision from more senior team members. The progress through this level is focused on taking tasks of increasing complexity, scope and importance and completing them with very high quality with a lessening need for manager/tech lead oversight.

This level is the bread-and-butter level of engineering growth. Engineers at this level should be focused on becoming great engineers, learning how to set high quality bars for their work without sacrificing productivity. All engineers at and above this level should religiously follow stated best practices for the team without excessive hand holding. Engineers at this level will continue to make mistakes, but should be improving the speed at which they learn from these mistakes. By the time an engineer II is ready to be promoted they will have focused on some technology as their expertise and become capable of mentoring interns and new engineers in these areas. They will start to participate more in the technical design process, often with guidance from senior engineers.

Engineers at this level are assumed to be constantly making steady progress on tasks that are assigned to them and know when to ask for help when they are blocked. They can own their independent small-to-medium features all the way through from technical design to launch. They are capable of prioritizing the work in front of them and able to make forward progress, avoiding the temptation to focus on unimportant details or excessive bikeshedding.

The impact at this level is focused on task completion and depth in a small area of the code base. Engineers at this level should be capable of taking responsibility for their code during releases as well as on-call support for simple incidents in areas that they are not always familiar with.

They communicate well and are capable of delivering feedback to peers and their manager. When given a task with unclear requirements they know how to ask for clarification, and ensure that all assumptions are vetted before work starts to reduce the need for re-work. They understand how their work fits into the larger picture for their team, and use this to identify conflicting requirements to their tech lead and product manager. An important focus of this level is developing empathy for the users of their software, whether they be internal employees, customers, or other developers on the team. A team member at this level is seeking out the context they need to understand the why of a particular feature and nurturing this empathy via that understanding.

Above all, they want to build something that fundamentally improves the lives of families.

What we’re looking for

Qualifications

• 2+ years experience with Ruby on Rails
• 3+ years of professional software engineering
• Solid experience with PostgreSQL or MySQL
• A thirst for knowledge and continuous learning
• Experience working on a team in a professional setting
• Demonstrated ability to collaborate well with a team
• Demonstrated ability to learn from mistakes
• Demonstrated ability to unblock themselves, asks for help where necessary
• Demonstrated good communication skills with teammates and showed a good degree of emotional and professional maturity.
• A connection to HopSkipDrive’s mission and values

Primary Responsibilities

• Communicate well with all members of the team
• Perform well-defined engineering tasks; doesn’t get caught up in the unknown, works to figure it out, asks questions
• Alert manager/team to any issues preventing their work from being accomplished, asks for help
• Actively pursue improving engineering skills, including but not limited to problem solving, writing readable/testable/efficient code, mastering technology in our stack, and learning to anticipate scaling issues.
• Seek to tie stories back to user value and impact for our drivers and organizers
• Contribute meaningfully to the definition of stories
• Pick up any story and suggest a solution for completing it
• Lean into challenges when they offer the potential to create large impact, and does so with productivity and positivity
• Be able to dive in to an area of the code/product that you’re not familiar with and make changes
• Make sure your code is readable & easy to maintain
• Make sure your code is tested appropriately
• Review other engineers’ code and provide constructive feedback
• Monitor changes in production and rollback if necessary
• Have production access and use it responsibly

What you will get

We want you to be an owner in our company and share in executing our vision, so every full-time employee has equity. In addition, we offer flexible vacation, medical, dental, vision and life insurance, 401(k), FSA, and an opportunity to work for a uniquely positioned, VC-backed company in a hugely attractive space with significant upside potential. HopSkipDrive is committed to fair and equitable compensation practices. The salary range for this role in Los Angeles, CA is $120,000 to $135,000. This position is remote and, as such, compensation will ultimately be in line with the location in which the position is filled. Final compensation for this role will be determined by several factors such as a candidate’s relevant work experience, skill set, certifications, and specific work location. The total compensation package for this role also includes equity stock options.

Equal Opportunity Employer

HopSkipDrive is proud to be an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, gender, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, national origin, genetics, disability, age, veteran status, or any other protected class. HopSkipDrive is also proud to operate as a drug-free workplace.