Senior Software Engineer II

About EF Go Ahead Tours

On the EF Go Ahead Tours product, we practice that travel is the best way to learn about the world, and our tours and travel experiences make it easy to get to the heart of a destination. As part of the world’s largest private education company, we draw on over 50 years of experience and a rich network of local Tour Directors, historians, and experts to create one-of-a-kind journeys for curious travelers. 

About the role 

We look for Senior Engineers that are passionate about taking business opportunities from need to delivery, and about the success of the other engineers around them. As a team we build platforms and tools that allow others to quickly enact and evolve their strategies around everything from marketing journeys, through funnel conversion, and in to producing our customer’s tour experiences. We also apply this same thinking to the technology choices and developer experience we create for our own team. 

You will have an opportunity to continue honing your skills in delivering critical functionality to the business, collaborating with more senior engineers on critical projects, and mentoring more junior engineers both in their career progression and in their day-to-day work. 

We consider this role to be invaluable to the business and a place where people can live and grow for the duration of their career. At the same time, you will also be positioned in this role to consider moves into career tracks in people management or into strategic engineering as part of our Staff Engineering group. We believe people should work where their passion is, and that a seat at the decision-making table shouldn’t be limited to those who manage people. 

You may be a fit for this role if you: 

• Have a passion for seeing beyond the current business strategy or customer experience, to creating an underlying platform that can enable and support ongoing transformation
• Value working with, and adding to, a diverse mix of talented people
• Enjoy working anywhere it the stack it takes to solve critical problems and create delightful experiences
• Have experience designing, building and maintaining thoughtful and re-usable UI components in some modern framework (React a plus), and composing them in to responsive, performant, and accessible customer experiences
• Have experience designing, building and maintaining thoughtful, re-usable, and performant APIs (Graphql experience a plus)
• Have experience working with multiple data storage technologies, an idea of how to pick the best fit for the job at hand, and some experience with understanding performance analysis and tuning
• Enjoy guiding less experienced engineers through projects, and helping them grow their careers through thoughtful mentorship
• Enjoy dissecting upcoming projects in to small, actionable, independently deliverable chunks
• Learn quickly and look forward to diving into new areas of the business or technologies to make an impact
• Enjoy finding moments to teach others about things you’ve learned or have a lot of experience in, either informally one on one or through putting together team training
• Champion high standards in customer experience, developer experience, and general quality metrics

What you’ll be doing at Go Ahead Tours: 

Your first week you will... 

• Go through onboarding to learn how EF works, including the various different products we offer worldwide, and our company history
• Get an overview of the systems and processes that power our team, such as how we write and ship software
• Have a meeting with your Tech Lead and lunch with your team
• Spend a little bit of time setting up your tech and some light paperwork
• Find some smaller tickets to get you in to the code and submitting your first PRs

Your first month you will…

• Collaborate with your team to understand the current projects technical and business context, and how that translates in to enhancing the platforms which run our business
• Attend deeper-dive onboarding trainings to learn more about the travel industry, how our products work, and our goals for the near future
• Learn how we track and measure success for our people, our teams, and our deliveries, and become more familiar with our processes
• Begin shaping your professional development plan through:
  • 1:1 meetings with your manager to touch on available opportunities and check in on the onboarding process
  • Meeting with the Director of Product, Director of Engineering, and the VP of Product and Engineering to grow those connections and learn about our strategy and direction
  • Attending the biweekly team trainings we hold on various topics
  • Taking time on the job to train on new technologies or technologies we use that you want to come up to speed on

Your first three months you will... 

• Work with your team lead to begin to help dissect and size upcoming work for the team, including owning portions of the project which you, or a small subset of the team, will plan and deliver on
• Collaborate regularly across teams to provide feedback on code and to help others work through complex problems
• Be familiar with the core product offerings and what role the Engineering organization plays in their growth
• Join in and contribute to team tactic and strategy conversations that set the goals for the near future
• Regularly meet with your manager to solidify your professional development plan and come up with actionable measures of progress
• Begin to seek opportunities to teach the team about things you're learning, and work with your manager to find opportunities to mentor more junior developers

About EF Education First 
At EF we believe that the world is better when people try to understand one another. Since 1965, we have helped millions of people see new places, experience new cultures, and learn new things about the world and about themselves. Our culturally immersive education programs—focused on language, travel, cultural exchange, and academics—turn dreams into international opportunities. 

When you join EF, you join a multicultural and diverse community working across more than 600 schools and offices in 50 countries, all with one shared mission of opening the world through education. Whoever you are, whatever you are passionate about—we welcome you and want you to bring that to work every day. EF is proud to be an equal opportunity employer and we are committed to inclusion and belonging across race, ethnicity, gender, age, religion, parental status, identity, experience and everything else that makes you unique. 

Founded in Sweden in 1965, EF has school and offices around the world, including hubs in Boston, London, Mexico City, São Paulo, Shanghai, Stockholm, Zürich, and more. Learn more at https://ef.com.