The Company

At Knovation, we believe that the most important advancements in digital curriculum content and personalized learning are still upon us. Through technology innovation and creativity we have raised the bar and are setting a new standard for personalized learning as we work to fulfill our mission to ‘ignite the hope of knowing by removing the barriers to learning.’

With more than a decade in the business and over 25 awards for educational excellence, today we're expanding our vision, innovating in ways that will make teaching and learning more creative, joyful, and personal. We are looking for talented, energetic and highly motivated people to be a part of the excitement that lies ahead.

Knovation is a mission-driven group of professionals passionate to make a difference in the lives of learners and those that make learning possible. Working here, you will discover a place where our dedicated professionals provide bold leadership, technical expertise, inspired ideas and distinctive service.

As an established market and thought leader in our space, we are fortunate to work with educators who are at the forefront of the digital transformation in education and are uniquely positioned to bring cutting edge products to this rapidly growing market.

At Knovation you will be engaged in meaningful, challenging work, where no two days are alike. As you conquer the challenges that each day brings, we will work equally hard to support your professional growth and recognize your contributions.

Knovation is developing several innovative new products in the K-12 education space using an agile development team to enable us to quickly bring new product ideas to market.

The Role

We are currently looking for a Ruby and Rails expert to help us build out a Cincinnati based engineering team. We are building a state of the art engineering environment on the Rails stack and as the first full time Rails developer on staff you will be a key player driving the technical direction of this effort and the future growth of this team.  If you are a top-notch programmer who enjoys leading develo pment teams building innovative applications in close collaboration with a team of committed and passionate product and domain experts, and you are comfortable using cutting edge technologies and development methodologies, we want to hear from you.

 

In general, we expect you to be an expert on Ruby as well as Rails and stay up to speed on the latest developments and tools in these ecosystems.  We also expect you to be very comfortable with technical leadership in an Agile environment and be able to onboard engineers who may not have had previous experience working with Agile processes or the Ruby/Rails stack.

 

We currently use Rails 3.2 with Postgres and Solr/Sunspot on the backend. Our front end stack uses HAML, SASS, and Backbone for the client side MVC framework.  We use RSpec and Jasmine for unit tests and RSpec/Capybara for our integration tests. We deploy to Heroku for development, staging and for the time being, production.  We are looking for an all-around Rails expert who has prior hands-on experience with most of these tools and can easily transition to take on a leadership role on team building a product utilizing these technologies. 

 

Additionally, we require:

• A minimum of 10 years of software development experience, with at least 3 years of recent experience in a software product company.
• A minimum of 3 years of experience with Ruby and Rails with demonstrated experience building and supporting production applications on this stack. If you have less than 5 years of experience with Ruby, then prior experience in a Java/J2EE based environment is strongly preferred.  
• Strong general understanding of both backend and front end development technologies and concerns, with expert level knowledge of at least one of the two. We want some one who is comfortable developing across the whole stack.
• At least 2 years of experience as a tech lead or a development team lead. This is a hands-on development role, but you will be expected to mentor and lead other engineers on the team.
• Minimum of 5 years of experience in an Agile development environment. You must be comfortable with Agile development practices and be able to mentor and lead other developers in adopting them when necessary.  

        

Benefits of Working at Knovation

• Competitive Compensation
• Excellent Medical and Dental Insurance
  • Choice of a PPO or Health Savings Account Plan
  • The Dental Plan includes a Vision Plan
• Company Paid Group Life Insurance with Accidental Death & Dismemberment
• Optional Voluntary Life Insurance with Accidental Death & Dismemberment
• Company Paid Short-term and Long-term Disability
• 401(k) Retirement Savings Plan
• Generous PTO Plan
• Eight Paid Holidays per Year
• Flexible Spending Account – Health & Dependent Day Care
• A relaxed work environment with a great culture!

Knovation is an Equal Opportunity Employer (EOE) and a Drug Free Workplace.