Site Reliability Engineer for open source, educational software

Hundreds of millions of children, youth, and adults around the globe lack access to quality education. Learning Equality strives to address this inequity by creating products and tools that can be adapted and contextualized to meet learning needs, with or without Internet access.

Founded as a nonprofit organization in 2013 by a group of students, Learning Equality first launched KA Lite, our first-generation platform which brought Khan Academy videos and exercises offline. Learning Equality expanded on that product in 2017 to create Kolibri, an adaptable end-to-end suite of open-source tools, educational resources, and support materials designed for offline-first teaching and learning. We've always focused on boosting learning outcomes in some of the world's most challenging contexts, supporting disconnected learning in refugee camps, rural schools, orphanages, and out-of-school programs. To date, Kolibri has been translated into 30 languages and is being used in over 215 countries and territories.

Learning Equality is directly supporting the implementation of Kolibri in more than 30 countries with collaborators such as UN Women, Vodafone Foundation, UNICEF, and UNHCR, as well as through a global network of organic adopters advocating for learning opportunities in their communities. With the support of organizations such as Google.org, the Hewlett Foundation, and the nonprofit tech accelerator Fast Forward, we are continuing to grow our products to be able to reach more communities around the world. 

We are looking for a Site Reliability Engineer who identifies strongly with Learning Equality's mission to bring quality education to under-resourced communities around the world. This engineer will be joining a team of three who collaborate closely; to simplify communication this role is open to applicants based in time zones similar to the continental US, such as Central or South American countries.

About our engineers and products 

Site Reliability Engineers at Learning Equality design and maintain servers to ensure stable global access to our products using such tools as Kubernetes, Docker, Terraform, Google Cloud Platform and PostgreSQL. Our deployed products are open source on Github.

You will help assure the stability, scalability, and reliability of our products, including:

• Kolibri Learning Platform: a lightweight, distributed application that learners, teachers and administrators use to interact with content. 
• Kolibri Studio: a curriculum management tool that gives users full control over the organization of their educational materials. 

This position might be for you if...

• You are an engineer. You are methodical, approaching challenges systematically and searching for root causes. You document what you learn for the future. We’re open to this role being junior or senior as long as solving problems with maintainable code is already an established part of your identity. 
• You specialize in containerized systems engineering. You understand the complexity of multi-tenant VPCs. You know what a subnet is. You are familiar with kubectl - and didn’t just look it up. You’re familiar with some of the hiccups that come with infrastructure-as-code. You run `terraform apply` without fear and you’ve upgraded a database to a new major version without a fire breaking out.
• You’re confident with our day-to-day tools. While we expect teammates to need to learn some new technologies on the job, we’re looking for someone to bring complementary strengths to our team and hope you’ll have experience with a minimum of Kubernetes, Docker, Git, and Terraform. 
• You’re an active collaborator. You thoughtfully review code, architecture, and design proposals. You give concise and constructive feedback. You write code that is meant to be easily understood and maintained by other contributors. 
• You are empathetic. When responding to incidents or reviewing requests you approach the situation from the perspective of someone using the application. You check your assumptions when architecting out a new service or tool to make sure it meets the concrete needs of the intended user and integrates with any pre-existing workflow.
• You are a life-long learner. You’re excited by a fast-paced, collaborative environment with regular opportunities to learn and apply new skill sets. 

Bonus points. Don’t let it hold you back from applying if you don’t meet these requirements but please mention if you do! 

• You are familiar with many of the tools and languages we use. Expertise with any of of the following would be beneficial:

1. Systems: Kubernetes, Docker, Terraform, PostgreSQL, Redis, Git, Google Cloud, Linux, CICD
2. Back-end: Django with Python and SQL databases
3. Front-end: Vue, Javascript, HTML, CSS

• You have experience in edtech or the education field. We aim to meet the needs of educators in a wide variety of learning environments; exposure to learning platforms, educational games, or direct experience as an educator would be valued. 
• You have experience with UX or UI. Whether or not you have formal training, you think about the experience of the end user when looking at a product. 
• You speak multiple languages. We collaborate with partnering organizations outside of the United States and continue to translate the Kolibri platform into additional languages; fluency in any languages in addition to English would be valued.