Top Ruby Jobs

The Skinny on Us:

Firecracker Inc. is a Boston-based startup looking to expand our development team. We're in the online learning space and our premier product uses spaced learning algorithms to help medical students study for the medical boards. We're enjoying 400% year over year growth and currently have 10% of the med school market but we're at an inflection point and want to rapidly fill out our feature set and expand into adjacent verticals.

Why You Might Care:

Education is a 7 trillion dollar industry; that’s 570 times bigger than the online advertising market and more than the GDP of Italy, France and the UK combined. Given this enormous investment we would expect that our education system does a good job of teaching us. Yet research shows this isn’t the case. Why? Because even though each of us learns in dramatically different ways, we are all taught the same material in the same way at the same pace.

That’s why Firecracker’s online learning platform gives us a custom learning plan that constantly adapts to our unique needs, learning style and knowledge base. It’s like having your very own personal tutor — 24/7. Unlike other adaptive learning solutions, Firecracker is rooted in proven cognitive science techniques such as spaced repetition and retrieval practice that dramatically increase knowledge acquisition, retention, and test scores. Tellingly, our three core methods were recently endorsed in this NYTarticle.

Still in beta, the first application of our platform serves first- and second-year medical students who consistently attribute whole letter grade improvements in their classes and test scores in the 99th percentile to our unique approach. Through word-of-mouth alone, sales are quadrupling every year. To better serve medical students and position Firecracker for rapid expansion, we are partnering with leading publishers such as $9B giant Wolters Kluwer. We will expand first within healthcare (e.g. dental, nursing), then to other higher education and professional markets (e.g. law, finance, technical/vocational) and later to secondary and primary school. Firecracker’s team is comprised of startup veterans, engineers and educators with decades of experience building revolutionary platforms in a wide variety of industries including healthcare, enterprise software and consumer internet. Celebrate learning at www.firecracker.me.

We're Looking For:

    Back-End Developer

• Extensive experience developing with RoR (including Redis/Resque, Memcached, etc.)
• Love affair with agile and TDD
• Experience with MySQL and proper DB design
• Comfortable with AWS (EC2 + S3)
• Experience with version control and a staged deployment environment (Git/Github, etc)
• Comfortable with RESTful API design and execution (Sinatra)
• Comfortable with command-line scripting in a unix environment
• Passion for exploring different design patterns
• Familiarity with service-oriented architecture

    Front-End Developer

• Extensive experience with RoR and HTML/CSS
• Javascript expert (including JQuery, Coffeescript, client-side MVC)
• Firm handle on CSS3
• Experience with front-end testing (Jasmine, view tests etc.)
• Beautiful design and UX sense and passion for making things simple, intuitive, and all sorts of fun

    Bonus Points If:

• You have a machine learning/AI background
• You like working with large datasets
• You throw up a little if you ever have to use Windows
• You know your way around Engine Yard or Heroku or custom-built production environments

It's a really exciting time at Firecracker and we have a blast doing what we do. If you want to have a hand at shaping one of the fastest-growing startups in the education space definitely write us and tell us how awesome you are, we'd love to know.