Director, State Contracts

Learning Ally is a leading nonprofit education solutions organization that transforms the lives of struggling learners by delivering proven literacy solutions that help students reach their potential. Its mission is to radically change education, transforming the lives of children by providing reading interventions and solutions to help them succeed academically, build self-confidence, and thrive in school and beyond.

65% of fourth graders read below proficiency and are 400% more likely to drop-out of high school. And, for “most at risk” students (students of color, low income, English Language Learners and students with learning disabilities) the problem is even more acute.

Learning Ally seeks to break this cycle. With early student assessment, intervention and accommodation and professional development for educators, Learning Ally can identify and prevent learning issues by working with schools and educators to support new and struggling readers. Our solutions build a strong foundation for independent, engaged learners who are empowered to achieve socially, emotionally, and academically, regardless of background or learning difference.

Founded in 1948 as Recording for the Blind, to help soldiers who lost their sight in combat continue their education with audiobook products, Learning Ally has evolved to help individuals understand the unique ways they learn and match them to the solutions that enable personal achievement.

Today, Learning Ally reaches over 1,600,000 students, 260,000 educators and 21,600 schools across the country and continues to expand its reach. With a continued commitment to supporting students who learn differently, Learning Ally has joined researchers and neuroscientists from renowned institutions including UCSF and MIT, to better understand and address learning issues. You will find that our culture is one that is very committed to our mission, innovation, professional growth, and diversity, equity, and inclusion.

The Director, State Contract leads a team of Implementation Success Managers, each of whom is responsible for a portfolio of state grants. The goal of an Implementation Success Manager (ISM) is to manage the entire customer lifecycle from initial implementation planning and roll out through contract renewal and expansion. They do this through managing the onboarding process, project planning, engaging educators through product trainings, conducting data and progress reviews, trouble-shooting along with customer stakeholders to drive usage and adoption, and strategic planning that will ensure contract renewal and uncover upsell opportunities. The Director, State Contract ensures each team member meets their usage and upsell targets through coaching and development, improvements to processes and practices, and ongoing leadership. They from time to time may need to manage the onboarding process for new accounts to help balance team capacity.

Key Responsibilities:

• Develop strong customer success/account management skills among your team of ISMs to drive usage and adoption of Learning Ally solutions in State Contract accounts
• Hold self and team members accountable to deliver goals for product usage, as our mission is to reach every student that needs Learning Ally’s solutions
• Hold self and team members accountable to deliver goals for upsell opportunities turned over to sales to ensure a healthy business
• Help individual ISMs prioritize accounts based on implementation health, contract renewal risk, and upsell potential
• Coach and give feedback to raise performance of individuals and the team
• Be point of escalation for your team’s customers needing extra support or issue resolution
• Attract top talent and nurture strong team engagement
• Develop and enact plans to scale team capacity as Learning Ally expands its footprint
• Balance customer needs with the strategic needs of maintaining and growing the business
• Streamline internal processes (metrics generation, etc.) to continually gain efficiencies and grow team load capacity
• Maintain strong product knowledge and develop and deploy a plan for your team to ensure their product knowledge remains strong
• Collaborate with Sales partners on large district initiatives and opportunities, and nurture effective teamwork between ISMs and their sales partners
• Partner with internal system admins to share team needs and suggest improvements
• Partner with Solutions (product) Management to inject customer feedback into development of new product and product enhancements

Essential Experience with Demonstrated Mastery:

In order to lead and grow this team of ISMs you must have extensive experience and demonstrated mastery in the following areas:

Customer Lifecycle and Portfolio Management:

• Manage and grow complex state grant customer accounts
• Cultivate trust and nurture customer relationship to serve as a “trusted advisor” for goal attainment and implementation success
• Leverage relationships to call school leaders to action
• Engage school leaders in thinking around future goals and outcomes beyond the present implementation plan and activities (driving toward renewal and upsell)
• Manage a portfolio of accounts by prioritizing customer needs and manage time and engagement strategies accordingly
• Anticipate and generate upsell opportunities
• Partner with Sales to close renewals with upsell attach
• Monitor status/implementation health of customer accounts and intervene to improve account health and customer sentiment
• Assess renewal risk and direct activities of the team to improve engagement and likelihood of renewal
• Provide monthly and quarterly business reviews
• Continually develop new “plays” for customer outreach to drive usage and adoption

Program Implementation:

• Develop, implement, and monitor a customized implementation plan
• Problem solve and work through implementation barriers
• Evaluate fidelity of implementation and work with educational leaders to mid-course correct, ensuring implementation goals are met
• Monitor data and generate status reports that call to action
• Leverage internal resources to ensure client needs are met
• Employ adult learning principles for effective engagement and transfer or learning in customer trainings both in-person and remote
• Understand the day to day challenges of teachers and can provide appropriate coaching

Team Leadership:

• Leadership of a post-sale implementation team
• Performance coaching
• Reporting to stakeholders on team performance
• Team building to keep remote teams engaged and supported
• Cross functional collaboration to ensure team and customer needs are met
• Data driven decision making

Core Competencies:

Thoughtful Problem Solving and Decision Making

• Takes a consultative approach with customers
• Understands there is no one size fits all approach when dealing with the customers we service
• Can ask the right questions, listens, and offers up well thought out solutions or options
• Helps team members think through customer situations and facilitate conversation to arrive at the appropriate next steps

Project & Time Management

• Ability to determine project goals and establish a plan with key work activities, timeline, milestone deliverables
• Great organization, attention to detail, and an ability to prioritize and manage time

Learning Mindset

• The product and K-12 market is always evolving. Love to learn and continuously expand your breadth and depth of knowledge
• Can learn from past experiences and use learnings to impact team and organizational growth
• Adopt an agile approach, gathering feedback and input throughout ideation and creation of new approaches, tools, team methods, etc.
• Love to coach and thrive by helping others around you thrive

Takes Ownership and Initiative

• Must be a self-starter with a demonstrated sense of drive, self-awareness, insight and personal motivation
• Proactively drives the work of the team and takes ownership of team results

Solution Oriented / Challenge the Status Quo

• Always asks how we can do it better
• Thinks outside the box to come up with new options and alternatives both internally and for our customers

Strategic Mindset

• Use data to prioritize work
• Understand the why behind team goals and develop strategic plans to support their goals to maintain and grow the business
• Balance the tactical with the bigger picture in order to drive account success and growth

Relationship Manager

• Establish strong relationships with your team and get involved with key accounts as appropriate
• Establish strong relationships with key business partners across Learning Ally to facilitate collaboration and enterprise leadership

Natural Leader

• Loves to dig in and seek out areas to grow and improve
• A role model that inspires others to thrive in their jobs and professional growth

Education and Qualifications:

• A Bachelor Degree in K-12 education is required, Masters in Education strongly preferred
• Minimum 3 years classroom teaching experience, experience working with struggling readers preferred
• Minimum 5 years in implementation management/customer success role supporting SaaS Educational Technology
• Minimum 2 years leading implementation teams

Reports to: National Director, Implementation Success

Learning Ally is an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability or veteran status.

School Success Coach - Northeast

Context:

Learning Ally is a leading nonprofit education solutions organization that transforms the lives of struggling learners by delivering proven literacy solutions that help students reach their potential. Its mission is to radically change education, transforming the lives of children by providing reading interventions and solutions to help them succeed academically, build self-confidence, and thrive in school and beyond.

65% of fourth graders read below proficiency and are 400% more likely to drop-out of high school. And, for “most at risk” students (students of color, low income, English Language Learners and students with learning disabilities) the problem is even more acute.

Learning Ally seeks to break this cycle. With early student assessment, intervention and accommodation and professional development for educators, Learning Ally can identify and prevent learning issues by working with schools and educators to support new and struggling readers. Our solutions build a strong foundation for independent, engaged learners who are empowered to achieve socially, emotionally, and academically, regardless of background or learning difference.

Founded in 1948 as Recording for the Blind, to help soldiers who lost their sight in combat continue their education with audiobook products, Learning Ally has evolved to help individuals understand the unique ways they learn and match them to the solutions that enable personal achievement.

Today, Learning Ally reaches over 1,600,000 students, 260,000 educators and 21,600 schools across the country and continues to expand its reach. With a continued commitment to supporting students who learn differently, Learning Ally has joined researchers and neuroscientists from renowned institutions including UCSF and MIT, to better understand and address learning issues. You will find that our culture is one that is very committed to our mission, innovation, professional growth, and diversity, equity, and inclusion.

The School Success Coach supports individual school customers in their Book of Business through the onboarding and successful implementation of the Learning Ally solution. They will leverage tools to reach many customers and monitor closely to see which customers need additional personalized support to ensure successful implementation. They must be able to prioritize accounts and the service provided to ensure maximum product usage and renewal rates. They are responsible for winning the renewal of their accounts.

Core Responsibilities:

Product Knowledge:

• Maintain expert level knowledge on all facets of our product and develop expert level knowledge of new products
• Consult with customers to match their needs and goals to program features and benefits.
• Keep updated on product enhancements

Program Implementation:

• Welcome customers to Learning Ally and initiate use of tools to walk them through the steps of implementation
• Monitor customer usage data sources to determine where action is needed
• Intervene for customers needing extra support by providing just in time resources
• Field inbound inquiries generated through automated implementation tools
• Deliver engaging live product training sessions via webinar for key accounts that require a more personal approach
• Ensure all outreach content is tailored to their staff and goals for implementation
• Readiness to handle small district-level relationships and multi-school implementations

Customer Lifecycle Management:

• Monitor customer usage data and intervene when necessary, using a variety of outreach tools
• Listen to customers carefully to understand their needs and personalize your support
• Anticipate customer needs based on time of year and level of implementation
• Promote reading engagement programs to encourage greater product usage
• Manage the renewal process with special attention to those customers at risk of not renewing
• Identify potential upsell opportunities and turn leads over to the Sale Colleagues

Core Capabilities:

• Excellent communication skills
• Excellent customer service skills
• Self-starter, driven to produce outcomes
• Able to act independently as well as collaborate as a team
• Ability to manage time and prioritize based on customer needs
• Ability to nurture and leverage customer relationships

Education and Qualifications:

• Bachelor Degree required. Degree in education and teaching experience strongly preferred.
• 3-4 years Experience in supporting customers or students in the adoption of a new initiative, program, etc.

Learning Ally is an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability or veteran status.

Data Science Fellow

Learning Ally is a leading nonprofit education solutions organization that transforms the lives of struggling learners by delivering proven literacy solutions that help students reach their potential. Our mission is to radically change education, transforming the lives of children by providing reading interventions and solutions to help them succeed academically, build self-confidence, and thrive in school and beyond. In the US, 65% of fourth graders read below proficiency and are 400% more likely to drop-out of high school. For most “at risk” students (students of color, low income, English Language Learners and students with learning disabilities) the problem is even more acute.

Learning Ally seeks to break this cycle. With early student assessment, intervention and accommodation and professional development for educators, Learning Ally can identify and prevent learning issues by working with schools and educators to support new and struggling readers. Our solutions build a strong foundation for independent, engaged learners who are empowered to achieve socially, emotionally, and academically, regardless of background or learning difference.

Founded in 1948 as Recording for the Blind, to help soldiers who lost their sight in combat continue their education with audiobook products, Learning Ally has evolved to help individuals understand the unique ways they learn and match them to the solutions that enable personal achievement. Today, Learning Ally reaches over 1,500,000 students, 200,000 educators and 18,550 schools across the country and continues to expand its reach. With a continued commitment to supporting students who learn differently, Learning Ally has joined researchers and neuroscientists from renowned institutions including UCSF and MIT, to better understand and address learning issues. You will find that our culture is one that is very committed to our mission, innovation, professional growth, and diversity, equity, and inclusion.

About the Data Science Fellow

The Data Science Fellow is a program designed for exceptional candidates who’ve demonstrated interest and passion for data science but may not yet fully possess technical training in data extraction and machine learning techniques typical of a data scientist. This program enables these candidates to develop skills in data extraction, data analysis, and business acumen while assisting in the resolution of data problems related to Learning Ally’s mission of ending the literacy gap in the United States by 2040.

Ultimately, outputs created by the Data Science Fellow enhance our ability to:

• Grow reach and revenue - develop high quality predictive models that better identify well-qualified prospective K-12 school customers. In conjunction with sales leadership, continually refine and update predictive models that drive greater growth among Learning Ally K-12 sales
  
• Surface insights that deepen engagement among users of Learning Ally solutions and services - create predictive models that examine the behaviors and selections of well-engaged Learning Ally users and use these to create algorithms that drive positive behaviors among other members and which ultimately lead to greater engagement with Learning Ally services
  
• Inform the development of new data-driven solutions and value proposition - develop statistical models that mine insights among Learning Ally’s community and which can be developed into value-add solutions that enable new solutions and services
  
• Address strategic business problems - help improve Learning Ally’s ability to solve
  complex business problems by bringing together disparate data streams and statistical analysis in order to drive improved decision makers
  

As a Data Science Fellow, you’re expected to be able to:

• Commit to taking the developmental steps needed in order to enhance your prowess around data extraction, data science analysis, and business acumen
  
• Work in multi-disciplinary and cross-functional teams to decode business requirements into machine learning based goals and modeling approaches; rapidly iterate model structure and design through parameter tuning, data transformation, and accuracy measurement selection to refine and validate approach
  
• Operate in a fast-paced and dynamic environment with both virtual and face-to-face interactions; communicating results and insights, and educating others through insightful visualizations, reports, and presentations adapted for both technical and non-technical audiences
  
• Empower others to be self-sufficient in data by building self-service tools and reports to drive awareness and understanding of key metrics
  
• Analyze large-scale structured and unstructured data; develop deep-dive analysis and machine learning models to drive member value and customer success.
  
• Support the design of experiments to test new product ideas or go to market strategies. Convert the results into actionable recommendations.
  
• Applies analytical rigor and statistical methods to analyze large amounts of data, using advanced statistical techniques such as predictive statistical models, customer profiling, segmentation analysis, survey design and analysis and data mining.

About the Data Science Fellow Curriculum

As a Data Science Fellow, you’ll develop key skills around areas of data extraction, data analysis, communication, and business acumen. Further detail is provided below.

1. Skill in data extraction
   1. Proficiency with SQL: SQL is the primary and foremost necessary concept at Learning Ally. Our data is stored in Relational SQL tables. We expect data scientists to know RDBMS in-depth to access, retrieve, and manipulate the data through SQL. We expect Data scientists to build and write complex queries involving joins, sub-queries and extract data to use it for further analysis.
      
   2. Proficiency with organizing data structures - Data scientists should be proficient with all the data produced in different systems across the business and understand how other systems are integrated, able to join data from disparate systems, and able to stitch together different data streams and make meaning. For example: Understand Building Data and connecting features available internally in NS, DMART, MDR, Marketo, and Excite.
      
   3. Proficiency with our business systems:
      1. Data Mart (DMART) and PowerBI: We have Microsoft SQL Server Analysis Services (SSAS) Cubes developed using Data Mart, which gathers data from different business systems. These existing cubes have defined business rules and can be accessed using PowerBI. Data related to ABS involving utilization of schools and users can be accessed via cubes in PowerBI. In addition, Cubes primarily use DAX Query language, and the data scientist should possess knowledge of the same. In addition, data scientists should be able to understand needs from other business units and translate those needs into data measures and work alongside Data Architect to have them produced in DMART.
      2. NetSuite (NS): Netsuite acts as our Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tool and has all the information of our relationships with customers and is primarily used by the Sales, Ed Success, Customer Success, and Finance departments. Data scientists should be able to understand different components of our CRM, possess knowledge of data available in NS, understand different integrations that exist in NS, build basic queries in NS, work with the NS team, and articulate needs for complex data requirements.
      3. Marketo: Marketing uses Marketo for prospecting and nurturing leads. Data scientists should be able to query the entire database of Leads in Marketo and be successfully able to retrieve leads based on specific criteria. In addition, work with Marketing to understand the different campaigns in flight that may affect leads.
      4. Launchpad (Excite): Excite has been developed on a new platform, “Launchpad,” that integrates with Clever. The Data Scientist needs to understand the overall Excite Database Schema, the hierarchy of Districts and Schools, User Information to extract insights on their usage behavior. All of the data is stored in SQL. Given that it is in the early stage of development, the data scientist would be expected to run queries and gather data for analysis continuously.
      5. Glide: The data scientist must understand glide and build applications as the Data Science team internally uses it to stitch different data streams together and share insights and data with other groups.
         
2. Skill in Analysis :
   1. Spreadsheets (Google Sheets/ Excel): Data scientists should be proficient when operating with Excel and are expected to analyze data, write formulas to summarize, and present the information. Here are some of the functions to be proficient in - conditional formatting, Ranges, Tables, Text functions, Date & Time functions, Subtotals, lookups, etc.
   2. Programming in Python - Data scientists should be proficient with Python, especially in Jupyter Notebooks, and should be experienced with two packages, namely: Pandas and Numpy. Once we have extracted data, the Data Scientist would use Python to transform data and visualize and examine other insights.
   3. Basic Statistics for Data Analysis: Data scientists are required to have a good understanding of certain critical statistical concepts for data analysis which include: Probability distribution functions (PDFs), Mean, Variance, Standard Deviation, Percentiles, Covariance, Correlation.
   4. Applied Machine Learning:
      1. Visualization: Data scientists should be familiar with using Matplotlib in Python as it is extensively used for data visualization and offers a lot of graphs and plots. In addition, the data scientist should also be comfortable plotting charts in spreadsheets.
      2. Machine Learning Algorithms: The data scientists should be comfortable using scikit learn, a machine learning library that provides almost all the machine learning algorithms. Further, the data scientist should be comfortable applying clustering, classification, regression, and dimensionality reduction algorithms and articulate what techniques to use based on the problem set.
         
3. Skill in Communication :
   1. Synthesize insights into crisp narratives and present to senior leadership and also able to effectively communicate findings and evangelize data-driven business decisions
      
4. Business Acumen/ Background knowledge of our Business:
   
   1. Understanding of our revenue model including various revenue streams, the nature of our subscription based business and segmentation within our K-12 Customers
   2. Understanding the different stages involved in a customer journey: Acquisition, Activation, Adoption and Advocacy
   3. Understanding different Solutions that we offer, our target audiences and the eligibility criteria for using our products.

Skills and Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree or higher with evidence of applied statistics and analysis, Master’s Degree preferred
  
• Excellent understanding of machine learning techniques and algorithms, such as k-NN, Naive Bayes, SVM, Decision Forests, etc.
  
• Experience with common data science toolkits, such as R, Python, NumPy, MatLab, etc.
  
• Experience with data visualisation tools, such as Microsoft PowerBI, Tableau, D3.js, GGplot, etc.
  
• Proficiency in using query languages such as SQL
  
• Good applied statistics skills, such as distributions, statistical testing, regression, etc.
  
• Data-oriented personality with ability to communicate findings across diverse field of business stakeholders
  
• Strong written and oral communication skills
  
• Ability to work successfully as part of a team

Learning Ally is an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability or veteran status.

Front End Designer

Learning Ally is a leading nonprofit education solutions organization that transforms the lives of struggling learners by delivering proven literacy solutions that help students reach their potential. Our mission is to radically change education, transforming the lives of children by providing reading interventions and solutions to help them succeed academically, build self-confidence, and thrive in school and beyond. In the US, 65% of fourth graders read below proficiency and are 400% more likely to drop-out of high school. For most “at risk” students (students of color, low income, English Language Learners and students with learning disabilities) the problem is even more acute.

Learning Ally seeks to break this cycle. With early student assessment, intervention and accommodation and professional development for educators, Learning Ally can identify and prevent learning issues by working with schools and educators to support new and struggling readers. Our solutions build a strong foundation for independent, engaged learners who are empowered to achieve socially, emotionally, and academically, regardless of background or learning difference.

Founded in 1948 as Recording for the Blind, to help soldiers who lost their sight in combat continue their education with audiobook products, Learning Ally has evolved to help individuals understand the unique ways they learn and match them to the solutions that enable personal achievement. Today, Learning Ally reaches over 1,500,000 students, 200,000 educators and 18,550 schools across the country and continues to expand its reach. With a continued commitment to supporting students who learn differently, Learning Ally has joined researchers and neuroscientists from renowned institutions including UCSF and MIT, to better understand and address learning issues. You will find that our culture is one that is very committed to our mission, innovation, professional growth, and diversity, equity, and inclusion.

Role Description

We are looking for a curious, creative, visual front-end designer to join our growing design team. In this role you’ll play a pivotal role in defining and designing the experience of millions of students and educators—taking science-based practices and making them accessible, engaging, and joyful for the many stakeholders (students, guardians, teachers, school administrators and more) in the reading education system. You will have a pivotal role in defining the design system—bringing best practices, a consistent, intuitive experience, and beautiful design to our growing suite of products, and the platform that supports them.

Responsibilities

• Create and Maintain a Design system
  You’ll get the chance to develop a design system to be used across Learning Ally’s growing portfolio of products. This system will consistent of common user-flows and interaction models, as well as a library of UI components and model for how they fit together. You’ll get to flex your graphic and experience design abilities to design an accessible, functional, and modern design system. You’ll be responsible for updating, organizing, and maintaining this system and ensuring that new products and features lead to a consistent experience for students and educators alike.
• Experience Design
  You will be responsible for ensuring that products and solutions deliver a high quality experience that delivers on Learning Ally’s values. You’ll work closely with Product Managers, contributing to strategic design work to help define the direction of our products and features, as well as more detailed UX research to evaluate user flows and ensure that user experiences are intuitive and delightful.
• Visual/Front-End Design
  Once user experiences are outlined, you will create pixel perfect designs to accommodate user stories to be implemented by the development team—establishing, implementing, evolving, and enforcing the design system
• Prototyping
  You will help conceive of new product ideas, create prototypes, and conduct prototype-based research to explore how potential new solutions or features will drive our impact and business. You’ll develop prototypes from storyboards, to rough wireframes, to high-fidelity click-through prototypes to gain insight about what our customers and stakeholders want and need and iterate towards final designs that create great differentiated experiences for educators and students.

Skills and Experience

• Front-end design:
  • You have a high bar for quality design, both from a usability and aesthetic perspective.
  • 3+ years of front-end design experience recommended but not required
  • Portfolio of UX/Experience design exhibiting the ability to design elegant solutions to customer needs—especially experiences that engage children
  • Advanced and organized use of Figma (or similar) design tools
  • You stay up to date on best UI, UX, and service design practices. You are able to find elegant solutions to the most challenging flows.
• Detail oriented and organized:
  • Comfortable working with Product Managers to completely and accurately align user stories and visual designs
  • Keep documents and designs organized and accessible to all stakeholders—developing new standards and organizational structures when needed
  • Manage workflows and timelines in conjunction with PMs to ensure that designs are prepared to meet timelines and milestones for developers and other stakeholders
• Communication:
  • Great visual and written communication skills
  • Can articulate the reasons for design decisions
  • Make designs and acceptance criteria clear for developers
• Customer oriented, Curious and Exploratory:
  • Familiar and able to deploy various methods of user-research to gain insight and feedback on customer experiences/prototypes
  • Data savvy: you are a keen consumer (and creator) of customer data. You are curious about how your designs perform in the real world to learn and iterate.
  • You are skilled and experienced in how to use a wide array of prototypes (from wireframes, to click-throughs, to storyboards, and marketing assets) to derive insight on real behaviors and mindsets of customers and other stakeholders.
• Entrepreneurial
  • You naturally take ownership for the products and projects to which you contribute—holding our products and our experience to a high standard
  • You can’t help but advocate for good design that drives towards impact and business goals

Learning Ally is an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability or veteran status.

Sr. QA Automation Engineer

Learning Ally is a leading nonprofit education solutions organization that transforms the lives of struggling learners by delivering proven literacy solutions that help students reach their potential. Its mission is to radically change education, transforming the lives of children by providing solutions based on the Whole Child Literacy System to help them succeed academically, build self-confidence, and thrive in school and beyond.

65% of fourth-graders read below proficiency and are 400% more likely to drop out of high school. And, for “most at risk” students (students of color, low income, English Language Learners, and students with learning disabilities) the problem is even more acute.

Learning Ally seeks to break this cycle. Our While Child Literacy System interacts at all levels of the educational system by simultaneously addressing the Whole Student and the Whole Educator.

To drive this goal, we are building and expanding our next-generation platform to enable a new portfolio of products and services that address a student’s cognitive, environmental, and literacy learning variables. Our goal is to create immersive digital learning experiences that help develop a student’s love of reading and support an educator’s understanding of their role in student success.

Our platform is built using microservices with APIs written in GraphQL and REST. We use Node.js and React and prefer typescript in our codebase. We deploy via Jenkins pipelines using Kubernetes on Amazon Web Services. That being said, we are not dogmatic and believe in using the best tool for the job.

We look for teammates who think about the platform and products holistically, build new services and features that are reliable and maintainable. If you are humble, curious, resourceful, and will challenge us to think differently about solutions, this is an incredible opportunity to drive change in education and improve how millions of students learn.

Role Description

You are an experienced QA Automation Engineer with a track record of manual and automated testing across a variety of platforms. Having a good understanding of current testing philosophies for all phases of the software development lifecycle you are ready to establish a best-in-class QA practice for Learning Ally. You are an expert in automation platforms and are ready to design and build from the ground up. You understand how to collaborate closely with engineering teams and business stakeholders and have a true ownership-oriented mindset, an extremely high bar for quality output, and are excited by the prospect of working at a rapidly growing organization.

Responsibilities

• Build a robust and impactful test automation framework leveraged across multiple teams

• Evolve/maintain the testing infrastructure once built
• Develop test cases, plans, and procedures for various types of testing
• Work closely with business stakeholders and engineers to plan, develop and execute test coverage across all apps and platforms.
• Provide leadership to the QA team by developing and empowering staff, cultivating relationships, putting staff in a position to succeed, meeting their personal career goals while also achieving organizational goals
• Engage in daily oversight and guidance of problem requests, prioritization, corrective and preventive actions, and change controls to deliver customer satisfaction.
• Manage operational performance by identification, monitoring, and trending of quality metrics
• Assist with external and internal audits
• Lead ongoing accessibility testing efforts, including working collaboratively with developers to proactively identify and remediate functions that do not meet Learning Ally’s accessibility standards.
• Foster a working environment that supports Learning Ally’s cultural values. Act as a role model and engage in discussions and feedback to ensure the intent of the culture statement is integrated into day-to-day activities, planning, and communications.

Skills and Experience

• 6+ years working in Quality Assurance and Software Development with experience in manual testing as well as automated testing of web applications and web services.
• 4+ years of experience with API testing tools and UI automation tools
• 2+ years of leadership experience
• Experience with automated testing tools such as Selenium, Cucumber, Cypress, or similar tool, required
• Experience with Java, Javascript, C#, Python, or other transferable languages
• Competency with databases including MSSQL/MySQL/NoSQL
• Experience in software development lifecycle including defect resolution process
• Experience in Web Services/API test automation
• Experience with Selenium Web Driver using JAVA to test front-end web-based applications
• Experience in test automation and proficiency creating automated unit, build, and regression test suites
• Experience leading conversations with customers and business stakeholders
• Ability to work with diverse teams, guide teams through decision making, facilitate agreement, build collaborative relationships, and focus on customer needs
• Candidates must have proven analytical ability and strong communication skills
• Experience executing and evaluating load test results

About Learning Ally

Founded in 1948 as Recording for the Blind, to help soldiers who lost their sight in combat continue their education with audiobook products, Learning Ally has evolved to help individuals understand the unique ways they learn and match them to the solutions that enable personal achievement.

Today, Learning Ally reaches over 1,600,000 students, 260,000 educators, and 21,600 schools across the country and continues to expand its reach. With a continued commitment to supporting students who learn differently, Learning Ally has joined researchers and neuroscientists from renowned institutions including UCSF and MIT, to better understand and address learning issues. You will find that our culture is one that is very committed to our mission, innovation, professional growth, diversity, equity, and inclusion.

Learning Ally is an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability, or veteran status.

Product Manager, Platform

Learning Ally is a leading nonprofit education solutions organization that transforms the lives of struggling learners by delivering proven literacy solutions that help students reach their potential. Our mission is to radically change education, transforming the lives of children by providing reading interventions and solutions to help them succeed academically, build self-confidence, and thrive in school and beyond. In the US, 65% of fourth graders read below proficiency and are 400% more likely to drop-out of high school. For most “at risk” students (students of color, low income, English Language Learners and students with learning disabilities) the problem is even more acute.

Learning Ally seeks to break this cycle. With early student assessment, intervention and accommodation and professional development for educators, Learning Ally can identify and prevent learning issues by working with schools and educators to support new and struggling readers. Our solutions build a strong foundation for independent, engaged learners who are empowered to achieve socially, emotionally, and academically, regardless of background or learning difference.

Founded in 1948 as Recording for the Blind, to help soldiers who lost their sight in combat continue their education with audiobook products, Learning Ally has evolved to help individuals understand the unique ways they learn and match them to the solutions that enable personal achievement. Today, Learning Ally reaches over 1,500,000 students, 200,000 educators and 18,550 schools across the country and continues to expand its reach. With a continued commitment to supporting students who learn differently, Learning Ally has joined researchers and neuroscientists from renowned institutions including UCSF and MIT, to better understand and address learning issues. You will find that our culture is one that is very committed to our mission, innovation, professional growth, and diversity, equity, and inclusion.

Role Description

As an education non-profit with a deep and meaningful literacy mission we keep our users at the epicenter of everything we build. With the increasing demand for digital literacy solutions, we need Product Managers that can help us accelerate student success through intuitive and effective learning tools and content. With your passion and capability for creating high-quality products, you will work across teams of engineers, user experience designers, internal stakeholders, and customers. You will support the product development teams and partner with fellow product managers in the design, development, and implementation of our audiobook solution and new platform capabilities. You will be driving the successful delivery of new features and improvements while acting as the conscience of the product and customer for the development teams.

Responsibilities

Work from a Problem-Solving Mindset

• Capture and distill problems from key stakeholders; translate those problems into opportunities that prove to be both impactful and viable
• Ability to synthesize problems, dependencies, and needs from multiple solution perspectives into highly-usable, delightful experiences on a single platform
• Implement human-centric, basic design principles such as user journeys, personas, user research, jobs-to-be-done and value prop canvases to name a few

Technical Product Management

• Lead technical teams to draft Agile epics and stories with an appropriate level of detail. Maintain a groomed backlog and prioritize stories for development, while managing scope and trade-offs.
• Demonstrate strategic facility with ability to prioritize from among multiple solution strategies so that the development team is focused on the most urgent opportunities to deliver
• Ensure rapid iterative delivery of value to customers by partnering with Program Managers and Engineering Leads to facilitate Agile ceremonies and ensure cross team dependencies are identified and managed
• Triage incoming software defects and queries from internal and external customers, following up to ensure defect resolutions meet SLA.

Provide Value-Add Input into Strategic Platform Roadmap

• Identify and understand future product needs by working closely with a variety of stakeholders.
• Partner with cross-functional leadership in planning and driving initiatives with stakeholders and technical teams. Create documentation as needed to streamline integrations and cross-team projects.

Go To Market

• Work with Marketing, Customer Care, and other customer-facing teams to ensure our customers are supported throughout the development and release lifecycle.
• Facilitate user testing programs, including business acceptance testing and user research.
• Showcase, document and provide training support for the software your team builds.
• Ensure cross-functional teams are enabled to sell, market, and support the platform and the solutions that reside within the platform with guidance from Solution Leaders

Collaboration and Communication

• Liaise with Solutions Leadership, Research and Design, and Pedagogy to ensure that solution requirements are aligned
• Act as a cross-functional leader at all stages of the development process
• Escalate potential issues and provide timely solutions to Solution Leadership or other stakeholders as appropriate
• Promote, share and celebrate the value your teams deliver across the organization.
• Document release notes, workflows, processes, case studies, training materials, and technical alternatives for specific epics or feature sets.

Skills and Experience

• Bachelor’s degree
• 3-5 years of experience in working with Agile-based, software product development teams.
• Successful in leading and collaborating across teams of technologists, designers, and customer-facing teams
• Product acumen with the ability to handle complexity and process new information quickly.
• Experience managing dynamic projects with competing resources and priorities
• Basic design and wireframe capabilities
• Ability to deliver results in a fast-paced, think-on-your-feet business environment
• High stamina for change; natural drive and excitement to turn new problems and challenges into opportunities
• High customer empathy
• Strong communication skills
• Background in education, or education products

Learning Ally is an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability or veteran status.

Product Manager, K12 Coaching and Tutoring

Learning Ally is a leading nonprofit education solutions organization that transforms the lives of struggling learners by delivering proven literacy solutions that help students reach their potential. Our mission is to radically change education, transforming the lives of children by providing reading interventions and solutions to help them succeed academically, build self-confidence, and thrive in school and beyond. In the US, 65% of fourth graders read below proficiency and are 400% more likely to drop-out of high school. For most “at risk” students (students of color, low income, English Language Learners and students with learning disabilities) the problem is even more acute.

Learning Ally seeks to break this cycle. With early student assessment, intervention and accommodation and professional development for educators, Learning Ally can identify and prevent learning issues by working with schools and educators to support new and struggling readers. Our solutions build a strong foundation for independent, engaged learners who are empowered to achieve socially, emotionally, and academically, regardless of background or learning difference.

Founded in 1948 as Recording for the Blind, to help soldiers who lost their sight in combat continue their education with audiobook products, Learning Ally has evolved to help individuals understand the unique ways they learn and match them to the solutions that enable personal achievement. Today, Learning Ally reaches over 1,500,000 students, 200,000 educators and 18,550 schools across the country and continues to expand its reach. With a continued commitment to supporting students who learn differently, Learning Ally has joined researchers and neuroscientists from renowned institutions including UCSF and MIT, to better understand and address learning issues. You will find that our culture is one that is very committed to our mission, innovation, professional growth, and diversity, equity, and inclusion.

Role Description:

Learning Ally is expanding to better meet the needs of the students, educators, and leaders we serve. As such, we have several solutions that are delivered in a high-touch way. We are looking for a service-oriented product manager to help shape the vision, design, and development of Learning Ally’s coaching and tutoring services to support this expansion. In this role, the product manager will be responsible for researching, implementing, monitoring, and evolving these services to ensure the highest value for our customers. This unique Product Manager will have experience designing from a human-centered design point-of-view with a special focus on people-delivered services supported by software and curriculum.

Key Responsibilities:

Customer Obsessed:

• Use design-research methods to gain frequent insight and understanding of student and educator needs to inform product design
• Drive offering strategy and vision to deliver high-quality solutions that meet customer needs
• Infuse delightful experiences in critical learning services utilizing best practices in student and adult learning

Product Strategy:

• Leverage research and data to maintain and evolve strategic vision
• Improve the design of the product and service to better serve educators, students, and buyers based on data and insight about how our solutions are being used
• Research and report on market trends, competition, and the customer problem space to stakeholders as directed
• Identify product positioning strategies. Partner with marketing and sales to ensure effective, differentiated competitive positioning.

Product Management:

• Manage product lifecycle for high-touch professional services
• Partner with cross-functional teams to execute against plans
• Liaise between internal stakeholder teams (e.g., engineering, development, marketing, research, QA, sales, etc.)
• Coordinate product launches
• Monitor the implementation and use of select high-touch professional learning solutions to ensure consistent, quality delivery and gain insights to drive growth
• Serve as product expert across Learning Ally.

Services Operations Design:

• Operationalize high-touch services; design, implement and monitor quality onboarding and delivery processes
• Create and implement appropriate user flow, systems design, and business requirements to be able to deliver services at scale
• Provide service blueprints for the sales and services enablement process
• Maintain solid and ongoing channels of communication across the company.

A Commitment to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion

• Intentionally address and tear down unconscious biases that get in the way of creating equitable and inclusive learning
• Implementation support that honors the diversity of those delivering and receiving services
• A demonstrable understanding of the problem set of the most underrepresented and marginalized students

Skills and Experience:

• Minimum 3-5 years of experience in product/service management

• Ability to develop and maintain a roadmap for multiple products.

• Ability to prioritize and manage multiple simultaneous deadlines.
• K-12 professional learning/development experience is highly valued
• Experience as a K-12 educator is not required but is helpful in understanding the problem space

• Experience design (journey mapping, workflow design, wireframing, etc.) and bring to market service offerings with digital touchpoints.
• Ability to develop and maintain a roadmap for multiple products.

• Ability to prioritize and manage multiple simultaneous deadlines.
• Excellent written and oral communication skills, including the ability to effectively convey technical information to non-technical colleagues and clients.

Learning Ally is an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability or veteran status.

Product Manager, Professional Learning

Learning Ally is a leading nonprofit education solutions organization that transforms the lives of struggling learners by delivering proven literacy solutions that help students reach their potential. Our mission is to radically change education, transforming the lives of children by providing reading interventions and solutions to help them succeed academically, build self-confidence, and thrive in school and beyond. In the US, 65% of fourth graders read below proficiency and are 400% more likely to drop-out of high school. For most “at risk” students (students of color, low income, English Language Learners and students with learning disabilities) the problem is even more acute.

Learning Ally seeks to break this cycle. With early student assessment, intervention and accommodation and professional development for educators, Learning Ally can identify and prevent learning issues by working with schools and educators to support new and struggling readers. Our solutions build a strong foundation for independent, engaged learners who are empowered to achieve socially, emotionally, and academically, regardless of background or learning difference.

Founded in 1948 as Recording for the Blind, to help soldiers who lost their sight in combat continue their education with audiobook products, Learning Ally has evolved to help individuals understand the unique ways they learn and match them to the solutions that enable personal achievement. Today, Learning Ally reaches over 1,500,000 students, 200,000 educators and 18,550 schools across the country and continues to expand its reach. With a continued commitment to supporting students who learn differently, Learning Ally has joined researchers and neuroscientists from renowned institutions including UCSF and MIT, to better understand and address learning issues. You will find that our culture is one that is very committed to our mission, innovation, professional growth, and diversity, equity, and inclusion.

Role Description:

Learning Ally is expanding to better meet the needs of the students, educators, and leaders we serve. As such, we have several solutions that are delivered in a high-touch way. We are looking for a service-oriented product manager to help shape the vision, design, and development of Learning Ally’s coaching and tutoring services to support this expansion. In this role, the product manager will be responsible for researching, implementing, monitoring, and evolving these services to ensure the highest value for our customers. This unique Product Manager will have experience designing from a human-centered design point-of-view with a special focus on people-delivered services supported by software and curriculum.

Key Responsibilities:

Customer Obsessed:

• Use design-research methods to gain frequent insight and understanding of student and educator needs to inform product design
• Drive offering strategy and vision to deliver high-quality solutions that meet customer needs
• Infuse delightful experiences in critical learning services utilizing best practices in student and adult learning

Product Strategy:

• Leverage research and data to maintain and evolve strategic vision
• Improve the design of the product and service to better serve educators, students, and buyers based on data and insight about how our solutions are being used
• Research and report on market trends, competition, and the customer problem space to stakeholders as directed
• Identify product positioning strategies. Partner with marketing and sales to ensure effective, differentiated competitive positioning.

Product Management:

• Manage product lifecycle for high-touch professional services
• Partner with cross-functional teams to execute against plans
• Liaise between internal stakeholder teams (e.g., engineering, development, marketing, research, QA, sales, etc.)
• Coordinate product launches
• Monitor the implementation and use of select high-touch professional learning solutions to ensure consistent, quality delivery and gain insights to drive growth
• Serve as product expert across Learning Ally.

Services Operations Design:

• Operationalize high-touch services; design, implement and monitor quality onboarding and delivery processes
• Create and implement appropriate user flow, systems design, and business requirements to be able to deliver services at scale
• Provide service blueprints for the sales and services enablement process
• Maintain solid and ongoing channels of communication across the company.

A Commitment to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion

• Intentionally address and tear down unconscious biases that get in the way of creating equitable and inclusive learning
• Implementation support that honors the diversity of those delivering and receiving services
• A demonstrable understanding of the problem set of the most underrepresented and marginalized students

Skills and Experience:

• Minimum 3-5 years of experience in product/service management

• Ability to develop and maintain a roadmap for multiple products.

• Ability to prioritize and manage multiple simultaneous deadlines.
• K-12 professional learning/development experience is highly valued
• Experience as a K-12 educator is not required but is helpful in understanding the problem space

• Experience design (journey mapping, workflow design, wireframing, etc.) and bring to market service offerings with digital touchpoints.
• Ability to develop and maintain a roadmap for multiple products.

• Ability to prioritize and manage multiple simultaneous deadlines.
• Excellent written and oral communication skills, including the ability to effectively convey technical information to non-technical colleagues and clients.

Learning Ally is an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability or veteran status.

Senior Full Stack JavaScript Engineer - ABS

Learning Ally is a leading nonprofit education solutions organization that transforms the lives of struggling learners by delivering proven literacy solutions that help students reach their potential. Our mission is to radically change education, transforming the lives of children by providing reading interventions and solutions to help them succeed academically, build self-confidence, and thrive in school and beyond. In the US, 65% of fourth graders read below proficiency and are 400% more likely to drop-out of high school. For most “at risk” students (students of color, low income, English Language Learners and students with learning disabilities) the problem is even more acute.

Learning Ally seeks to break this cycle. With early student assessment, intervention and accommodation and professional development for educators, Learning Ally can identify and prevent learning issues by working with schools and educators to support new and struggling readers. Our solutions build a strong foundation for independent, engaged learners who are empowered to achieve socially, emotionally, and academically, regardless of background or learning difference.

Founded in 1948 as Recording for the Blind, to help soldiers who lost their sight in combat continue their education with audiobook products, Learning Ally has evolved to help individuals understand the unique ways they learn and match them to the solutions that enable personal achievement. Today, Learning Ally reaches over 1,500,000 students, 200,000 educators and 18,550 schools across the country and continues to expand its reach. With a continued commitment to supporting students who learn differently, Learning Ally has joined researchers and neuroscientists from renowned institutions including UCSF and MIT, to better understand and address learning issues. You will find that our culture is one that is very committed to our mission, innovation, professional growth, and diversity, equity, and inclusion.

Role Description

As a Senior Full-Stack JavaScript Engineer, you will be responsible for both driving the strategy and execution of Learning Ally’s goal to develop and implement digital products that will allow us to deliver a portfolio of learning solutions to students, supported by teachers and parents.

This individual will work with a team of talented developers and internal stakeholders to ensure that we are balancing both short-term and long-term goals. You will work closely with current product and platform teams to build and integrate functionality into a platform solution allowing for multiple cross-functional teams to concurrently produce value.

Projects you could work on

• Whole Child Insights - ingest clickstream and transactional events in real-time from educator and student-facing applications. Crunch massive amounts of data into accurate efficacy and engagement insights for students, educators, and families.

• Human-read Audiobook - Build immersive reading experiences for students that go beyond text and audio. Implement interactive assessments and motivational features that are designed to be playful and keep students engaged while reading diverse and authentic literature.

• Rostering integrations- Work with large data sets that support the onboarding and daily data synchronization of student and school roster data to ensure all students have access to our platform. We currently work with over 20000 schools in the US and have a goal to establish relationships with 50% of all schools in the US.

• Immersive and Engaging Frontend - Educators are busier than ever and students have experienced massive disruption in their learning journeys. We are passionate about building simple and intuitive learning experiences that bring joy to students and efficiency for educators.

• Professional development for Educators - Build content stores and experiences for courseware and just-in-time learning for teachers that build their strengths as an educator while bolstering belief in every one of their students.

Responsibilities

• Set technology standards and direct the execution of initiatives to develop a learning management platform from inception through implementation.
• Work with engineering teams to solve a class of problems highly technical in nature: (Architecture, Code, Scale, and Security)
• Work with our team to establish and improve internal processes and workflows
• Lead and contribute to the growth and development of the software engineering team
• Provide technical guidance and coaching to peers
• Exhibit a hunger for continuous learning and improvement
• Work with an entrepreneurial mindset
• Foster a working environment that supports Learning Ally’s cultural values. Act as a role model and engage in discussions and feedback to ensure the intent of the culture statement is integrated into day-to-day activities, planning, and communications.

Skills and Experience

• 8+ years of relevant experience; including 2+ years managing engineers

• Experience with a tech stack that is similar to ours: AWS, Node.js, React, GraphQL, REST, SQL/NoSQL databases designed in a microservice architecture
• Experience growing the skills and leadership capacity of staff engineers
• Prior experience working in Lean and Agile environments - Hypothesis testing, MVPs, Iterative development
• Proficient with Node.js and related frameworks (Express, Nest)
• Experience with React based-frameworks (Next)
• Proficiency with relational SQL, NoSQL databases, and ORMs.
• Experience with RESTful APIs and GraphQL.
• Experience with CI/CD tools (e.g. Jenkins, Github Actions, etc)
• Experience with Docker, Kubernetes, or other container systems
• Education Technology experience preferred.

Travel: none

Learning Ally is an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability or veteran status.

Front End Designer

Learning Ally is a leading nonprofit education solutions organization that transforms the lives of struggling learners by delivering proven literacy solutions that help students reach their potential. Our mission is to radically change education, transforming the lives of children by providing reading interventions and solutions to help them succeed academically, build self-confidence, and thrive in school and beyond. In the US, 65% of fourth graders read below proficiency and are 400% more likely to drop-out of high school. For most “at risk” students (students of color, low income, English Language Learners and students with learning disabilities) the problem is even more acute.

Learning Ally seeks to break this cycle. With early student assessment, intervention and accommodation and professional development for educators, Learning Ally can identify and prevent learning issues by working with schools and educators to support new and struggling readers. Our solutions build a strong foundation for independent, engaged learners who are empowered to achieve socially, emotionally, and academically, regardless of background or learning difference.

Founded in 1948 as Recording for the Blind, to help soldiers who lost their sight in combat continue their education with audiobook products, Learning Ally has evolved to help individuals understand the unique ways they learn and match them to the solutions that enable personal achievement. Today, Learning Ally reaches over 1,500,000 students, 200,000 educators and 18,550 schools across the country and continues to expand its reach. With a continued commitment to supporting students who learn differently, Learning Ally has joined researchers and neuroscientists from renowned institutions including UCSF and MIT, to better understand and address learning issues. You will find that our culture is one that is very committed to our mission, innovation, professional growth, and diversity, equity, and inclusion.

Role Description

We are looking for a curious, creative, visual front-end designer to join our growing design team. In this role you’ll play a pivotal role in defining and designing the experience of millions of students and educators—taking science-based practices and making them accessible, engaging, and joyful for the many stakeholders (students, guardians, teachers, school administrators and more) in the reading education system. You will have a pivotal role in defining the design system—bringing best practices, a consistent, intuitive experience, and beautiful design to our growing suite of products, and the platform that supports them.

Responsibilities

• Create and Maintain a Design system
  You’ll get the chance to develop a design system to be used across Learning Ally’s growing portfolio of products. This system will consistent of common user-flows and interaction models, as well as a library of UI components and model for how they fit together. You’ll get to flex your graphic and experience design abilities to design an accessible, functional, and modern design system. You’ll be responsible for updating, organizing, and maintaining this system and ensuring that new products and features lead to a consistent experience for students and educators alike.
• Experience Design
  You will be responsible for ensuring that products and solutions deliver a high quality experience that delivers on Learning Ally’s values. You’ll work closely with Product Managers, contributing to strategic design work to help define the direction of our products and features, as well as more detailed UX research to evaluate user flows and ensure that user experiences are intuitive and delightful.
• Visual/Front-End Design
  Once user experiences are outlined, you will create pixel perfect designs to accommodate user stories to be implemented by the development team—establishing, implementing, evolving, and enforcing the design system
• Prototyping
  You will help conceive of new product ideas, create prototypes, and conduct prototype-based research to explore how potential new solutions or features will drive our impact and business. You’ll develop prototypes from storyboards, to rough wireframes, to high-fidelity click-through prototypes to gain insight about what our customers and stakeholders want and need and iterate towards final designs that create great differentiated experiences for educators and students.

Skills and Experience

• Front-end design:
  • You have a high bar for quality design, both from a usability and aesthetic perspective.
  • 3+ years of front-end design experience recommended but not required
  • Portfolio of UX/Experience design exhibiting the ability to design elegant solutions to customer needs—especially experiences that engage children
  • Advanced and organized use of Figma (or similar) design tools
  • You stay up to date on best UI, UX, and service design practices. You are able to find elegant solutions to the most challenging flows.
• Detail oriented and organized:
  • Comfortable working with Product Managers to completely and accurately align user stories and visual designs
  • Keep documents and designs organized and accessible to all stakeholders—developing new standards and organizational structures when needed
  • Manage workflows and timelines in conjunction with PMs to ensure that designs are prepared to meet timelines and milestones for developers and other stakeholders
• Communication:
  • Great visual and written communication skills
  • Can articulate the reasons for design decisions
  • Make designs and acceptance criteria clear for developers
• Customer oriented, Curious and Exploratory:
  • Familiar and able to deploy various methods of user-research to gain insight and feedback on customer experiences/prototypes
  • Data savvy: you are a keen consumer (and creator) of customer data. You are curious about how your designs perform in the real world to learn and iterate.
  • You are skilled and experienced in how to use a wide array of prototypes (from wireframes, to click-throughs, to storyboards, and marketing assets) to derive insight on real behaviors and mindsets of customers and other stakeholders.
• Entrepreneurial
  • You naturally take ownership for the products and projects to which you contribute—holding our products and our experience to a high standard
  • You can’t help but advocate for good design that drives towards impact and business goals

Learning Ally is an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability or veteran status.

Instructional Designer

Learning Ally is a leading nonprofit education solutions organization that transforms the lives of struggling learners by delivering proven literacy solutions that help students reach their potential. Our mission is to radically change education, transforming the lives of children by providing reading interventions and solutions to help them succeed academically, build self-confidence, and thrive in school and beyond. In the US, 65% of fourth graders read below proficiency and are 400% more likely to drop-out of high school. For most “at risk” students (students of color, low income, English Language Learners and students with learning disabilities) the problem is even more acute.

Learning Ally seeks to break this cycle. With early student assessment, intervention and accommodation and professional development for educators, Learning Ally can identify and prevent learning issues by working with schools and educators to support new and struggling readers. Our solutions build a strong foundation for independent, engaged learners who are empowered to achieve socially, emotionally, and academically, regardless of background or learning difference.

Founded in 1948 as Recording for the Blind, to help soldiers who lost their sight in combat continue their education with audiobook products, Learning Ally has evolved to help individuals understand the unique ways they learn and match them to the solutions that enable personal achievement. Today, Learning Ally reaches over 1,500,000 students, 200,000 educators and 18,550 schools across the country and continues to expand its reach. With a continued commitment to supporting students who learn differently, Learning Ally has joined researchers and neuroscientists from renowned institutions including UCSF and MIT, to better understand and address learning issues. You will find that our culture is one that is very committed to our mission, innovation, professional growth, and diversity, equity, and inclusion.

Role Description:

Learning Ally’s Professional Learning business is expanding to better the needs of the students, educators, and leaders whom we serve. We are looking for an instructional designer to help build learning content to support K-12 students, teachers, and leaders. The Instructional Designer’s primary role is researching, designing, and developing professional learning for multiple modalities of delivery that have identifiable best practices in adult learning engagement and efficacy. This person is responsible for developing content with a strong product-market fit that meets identified learning outcomes to support K–12 educators across one or more discipline areas. You have a strong understanding of modern adult learning theory and the ability to apply that theory to develop highly valuable, applicable learning experiences for K-12 educators. You enjoy collaboration – recognizing that it takes many types of expertise to develop great solutions. You are committed to a working culture of inclusion, equity, empowerment, purpose, and fun. You demand that all of our solutions reflect our commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion.

Key Responsibilities:

• Instructional Design:
  • Design, develop, manage, and edit professional learning content and resources that are highly engaging and polished for delivery in multiple modalities
  • Creates learning experiences and environments for a variety of purposes.
  • Designs learning activities, assignments, and experiences, as well as assessments to measure outcomes
  • Develop online learning courses using the latest in adult learning theory.
  • Develops facilitator and participant materials (such as manuals, rubrics, and other teaching tools).

• • Partners with content writers to develop scripts for video and audio content.

• Collaborate with Other Learning Experts:

• • Advocate for adult learning best practices in Professional Learning solution design
  • Collaborates with subject experts and advisors to synthesize and develop content.
  • Leverage and contribute to Learning Ally’s point-of-view around pedagogy and learning
  • Keeps current on best practices in instructional design and the latest in modern adult learning practices.

Solution Design:

• • Leverages feedback and input to analyzes, update, and modify existing content
  • Contribute to or lead human-centered design principles such as jobs-to-be-done framework, persona development, problem statements, interviewing, iterative development, and user flow design
  • Works with Learning Ally technical teams to ensure accurate delivery of online professional learning content
  • Supports implementation teams in the development and implementation of high-quality facilitator enablement.

• A Commitment to DEI Principles in All Elements of Instructional Design

Skills and Experience:

• Bachelor's degree required
• Minimum 5 years of experience in product/service development or instructional design
• Preference given - but not required - to teaching experience in K–12 education
• Demonstrated command of basic instructional design principles
• Superior written/oral communication skills
• Excellent interpersonal skills; able to mix easily and well with peers, subordinates, and senior management
• Adaptability and aptitude to learn new technologies to support content development
• Strong project planning and operational skills

• Experience developing professional learning materials using modern adult learning practices.
• Proficiency in designing learning experiences within a learning management system
• Experience developing content using digital creation tools such as Articulate Storyline, Camtasia, etc.
• Excellent project management and organizational skills

• Ability to prioritize and manage multiple simultaneous deadlines
• Excellent written and oral communication skills, including the ability to effectively convey technical information to non-technical colleagues and clients

Learning Ally is an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability or veteran status.

Multimedia Learning Assets Designer

Learning Ally is a leading nonprofit education solutions organization that transforms the lives of struggling learners by delivering proven literacy solutions that help students reach their potential. Our mission is to radically change education, transforming the lives of children by providing reading interventions and solutions to help them succeed academically, build self-confidence, and thrive in school and beyond. In the US, 65% of fourth graders read below proficiency and are 400% more likely to drop-out of high school. For most “at risk” students (students of color, low income, English Language Learners and students with learning disabilities) the problem is even more acute.

Learning Ally seeks to break this cycle. With early student assessment, intervention and accommodation and professional development for educators, Learning Ally can identify and prevent learning issues by working with schools and educators to support new and struggling readers. Our solutions build a strong foundation for independent, engaged learners who are empowered to achieve socially, emotionally, and academically, regardless of background or learning difference.

Founded in 1948 as Recording for the Blind, to help soldiers who lost their sight in combat continue their education with audiobook products, Learning Ally has evolved to help individuals understand the unique ways they learn and match them to the solutions that enable personal achievement. Today, Learning Ally reaches over 1,500,000 students, 200,000 educators and 18,550 schools across the country and continues to expand its reach. With a continued commitment to supporting students who learn differently, Learning Ally has joined researchers and neuroscientists from renowned institutions including UCSF and MIT, to better understand and address learning issues. You will find that our culture is one that is very committed to our mission, innovation, professional growth, and diversity, equity, and inclusion.

Role Description

We are looking for a creative and skilled multi-dimensional designer to create enriching learning assets for teacher Professional Learning and student software curriculum. This role will report into the Director of UX and Design but will engage heavily with product leadership to design and create rich video, animation, illustration, and graphic design elements for online learning and software-based curriculum. As the Learning Assets Designer, you’ll play a critical role in creating meaningful science-backed solutions for students and teachers. You have high quality standards, approach design with customer centric mindset, and are committed to internal and external customer service. Your work exudes a joyfulness that is necessary for learning and learners of all ages.

Responsibilities

• Functional, Beautiful and Consistent Visual Design:
  • Create functional and beautiful multimedia assets with high collaboration with instructional design, product management, and user experience
  • Graphic and motion design skills
  • Follow and contribute to a design system
  • Ensure highest standard of accessibility in every deliverable
• Creative Execution:
  • Deliver learning assets to meet requirements of various product lines
  • Leverage graphic design skills with knowledge of UX to create slide templates, audio-visual assets, animations, product brand iconography, and similar outputs.
• Design and Delivery Process Expert:
  • Demonstrate strong project organization skills, setting and meeting clear timelines
  • Work with key stakeholders to ensure that content fits seamlessly into the experience of the various solutions
  • Manage vendor relationships as needed in order to complete critical work.
• A Delivery Mindset:
  • Responsible for ensuring that products and solutions deliver a high quality experience that delivers on Learning Ally’s values
  • Provide service to products, ensuring timeliness, manage deadlines independently, and collaborating on best format and design to solve educator and student problems
  • Create or contribute to the development of design systems, library and other processes and assets to drive quality, consistency and efficiency of design processes as part of the Research and Design team

• A Commitment to Equity and Inclusion in Design
  • Demonstrate a point-of-view that ensure diversity, equity and inclusion in each project every time
  • Understand accessibility requirements, ensuring that assets can meet WCAG compliance requirements

Skills and Experience

• 1-3 years of experience in graphic design, multimedia design, or similar. You are comfortable developing elegant deliverables with speed that are grounded in user insight and data.
• You have some understanding of UX practices. You are comfortable creating and guiding the creation of design assets like user flows, architectures, storyboards, and screens as they relate to educational content like assessments, learning games, instructional video animation, etc
• You are up to date on best graphic design and media design practices. You have a high bar for quality design, both from a usability and aesthetic perspective and are able to execute to that standard.
• You are skilled and experienced in a wide array of asset creation from video, to animation, to brand iconography, and presentations.
• Experience creating excellent design and assets for products. You understand the importance of high-quality, engaging work to draw learners of all ages into the process. You’ve worked with product managers to phase work and prioritize work to maximize speed to market while delivering a great customer experience.
• Accessibility standards

Learning Ally is an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability or veteran status.

Product Manager, High Touch Services

Learning Ally is a leading nonprofit education solutions organization that transforms the lives of struggling learners by delivering proven literacy solutions that help students reach their potential. Our mission is to radically change education, transforming the lives of children by providing reading interventions and solutions to help them succeed academically, build self-confidence, and thrive in school and beyond. In the US, 65% of fourth graders read below proficiency and are 400% more likely to drop-out of high school. For most “at risk” students (students of color, low income, English Language Learners and students with learning disabilities) the problem is even more acute.

Learning Ally seeks to break this cycle. With early student assessment, intervention and accommodation and professional development for educators, Learning Ally can identify and prevent learning issues by working with schools and educators to support new and struggling readers. Our solutions build a strong foundation for independent, engaged learners who are empowered to achieve socially, emotionally, and academically, regardless of background or learning difference.

Founded in 1948 as Recording for the Blind, to help soldiers who lost their sight in combat continue their education with audiobook products, Learning Ally has evolved to help individuals understand the unique ways they learn and match them to the solutions that enable personal achievement. Today, Learning Ally reaches over 1,500,000 students, 200,000 educators and 18,550 schools across the country and continues to expand its reach. With a continued commitment to supporting students who learn differently, Learning Ally has joined researchers and neuroscientists from renowned institutions including UCSF and MIT, to better understand and address learning issues. You will find that our culture is one that is very committed to our mission, innovation, professional growth, and diversity, equity, and inclusion.

Role Description:

Learning Ally is expanding to better meet the needs of the students, educators, and leaders we serve. As such, we have several solutions that are delivered in a high-touch way. We are looking for a service-oriented product manager to help shape the vision, design, and development of Learning Ally’s coaching and tutoring services to support this expansion. In this role, the product manager will be responsible for researching, implementing, monitoring, and evolving these services to ensure the highest value for our customers. This unique Product Manager will have experience designing from a human-centered design point-of-view with a special focus on people-delivered services supported by software and curriculum.

Key Responsibilities:

Customer Obsessed:

• Use design-research methods to gain frequent insight and understanding of student and educator needs to inform product design
• Drive offering strategy and vision to deliver high-quality solutions that meet customer needs
• Infuse delightful experiences in critical learning services utilizing best practices in student and adult learning

Product Strategy:

• Leverage research and data to maintain and evolve strategic vision
• Improve the design of the product and service to better serve educators, students, and buyers based on data and insight about how our solutions are being used
• Research and report on market trends, competition, and the customer problem space to stakeholders as directed
• Identify product positioning strategies. Partner with marketing and sales to ensure effective, differentiated competitive positioning.

Product Management:

• Manage product lifecycle for high-touch professional services
• Partner with cross-functional teams to execute against plans
• Liaise between internal stakeholder teams (e.g., engineering, development, marketing, research, QA, sales, etc.)
• Coordinate product launches
• Monitor the implementation and use of select high-touch professional learning solutions to ensure consistent, quality delivery and gain insights to drive growth
• Serve as product expert across Learning Ally.

Services Operations Design:

• Operationalize high-touch services; design, implement and monitor quality onboarding and delivery processes
• Create and implement appropriate user flow, systems design, and business requirements to be able to deliver services at scale
• Provide service blueprints for the sales and services enablement process
• Maintain solid and ongoing channels of communication across the company.

A Commitment to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion

• Intentionally address and tear down unconscious biases that get in the way of creating equitable and inclusive learning
• Implementation support that honors the diversity of those delivering and receiving services
• A demonstrable understanding of the problem set of the most underrepresented and marginalized students

Skills and Experience:

• Minimum 3-5 years of experience in product/service management

• Ability to develop and maintain a roadmap for multiple products.

• Ability to prioritize and manage multiple simultaneous deadlines.
• K-12 professional learning/development experience is highly valued
• Experience as a K-12 educator is not required but is helpful in understanding the problem space

• Experience design (journey mapping, workflow design, wireframing, etc.) and bring to market service offerings with digital touchpoints.
• Ability to develop and maintain a roadmap for multiple products.

• Ability to prioritize and manage multiple simultaneous deadlines.
• Excellent written and oral communication skills, including the ability to effectively convey technical information to non-technical colleagues and clients.

Learning Ally is an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability or veteran status.

Director of Engineering (Platform)

Learning Ally is a leading nonprofit education solutions organization that transforms the lives of struggling learners by delivering proven literacy solutions that help students reach their potential. Our mission is to radically change education, transforming the lives of children by providing reading interventions and solutions to help them succeed academically, build self-confidence, and thrive in school and beyond. In the US, 65% of fourth graders read below proficiency and are 400% more likely to drop-out of high school. For most “at risk” students (students of color, low income, English Language Learners and students with learning disabilities) the problem is even more acute.

Learning Ally seeks to break this cycle. With early student assessment, intervention and accommodation and professional development for educators, Learning Ally can identify and prevent learning issues by working with schools and educators to support new and struggling readers. Our solutions build a strong foundation for independent, engaged learners who are empowered to achieve socially, emotionally, and academically, regardless of background or learning difference.

Founded in 1948 as Recording for the Blind, to help soldiers who lost their sight in combat continue their education with audiobook products, Learning Ally has evolved to help individuals understand the unique ways they learn and match them to the solutions that enable personal achievement. Today, Learning Ally reaches over 1,500,000 students, 200,000 educators and 18,550 schools across the country and continues to expand its reach. With a continued commitment to supporting students who learn differently, Learning Ally has joined researchers and neuroscientists from renowned institutions including UCSF and MIT, to better understand and address learning issues. You will find that our culture is one that is very committed to our mission, innovation, professional growth, and diversity, equity, and inclusion.

Director of Engineering (Platform)

Role Description

As the Director of Engineering (Platform) you will lead and contribute to a cross-functional infrastructure and security team. Working alongside product teams, engineering and devops leaders, you will develop technology roadmaps, assist in the architecture and development of foundational systems and implement innovative orchestration tools, monitoring, information pipelines and foundational infrastructure platforms to support our growing portfolio of products focused on delivering value to educators and students.

Our Platform team works on challenging product and infrastructure-focused problems. Our systems are built to process and provide real-time and near real-time data to drive product capabilities and ensure accurate analytics.

Responsibilities

• You will lead, manage and hire for the Platform team with a steady, agile and hands-on leadership approach
• You will contribute to all things Platform development and deployment, including the selection of scalable architecture solutions, CI/CD strategies, engineering processes, peer-reviewed coding, and enhancing platform security
• Drive impact through Engineering Managers and Staff Engineers by promoting sound engineering practices, regularly assessing the technical state of teams, and providing mentoring, coaching, and sponsorship.
• Create a high-trust, ownership-oriented environment
• Ensure our solutions are scalable, balanced, architecturally sound, and that technical debt is incurred consciously and repaid in a reasonable time.
• Be accountable for the technical vision and long-term strategy for the digital platform.
• Design and evolve the organization structure based on business needs.
• Foster a working environment that supports Learning Ally’s cultural values. Act as a role model and engage in discussions and feedback to ensure the intent of the culture statement is integrated into day-to-day activities, planning and communications.

Skills and Experience

• 10+ years of relevant experience; including 4+ years leading a team and 5+ years as a developer
• Experience with a tech stack that is similar to ours: AWS, Node.js, React, GraphQL, REST, SQL/NoSQL databases designed in a microservice architecture.
• Experience growing the skills and leadership capacity of engineering teams
• Demonstrated experience using major cloud platform services and architectures to build consumer-facing products
• Prior experience working in Lean and Agile environments - Hypothesis testing, MVPs, Iterative development
• Experience building psychologically safe environments that encourage everyone to contribute their ideas and feedback to the conversation
• Experience working with cross-functional teams and collaborating across all areas of the business to align stakeholders with competing priorities
• Proven ability to tie the organization’s goals, both big and small, to build technology solutions that enable and drive growth.

Project Manager, Audiobooks

Learning Ally is a leading nonprofit education solutions organization that transforms the lives of struggling learners by delivering proven literacy solutions that help students reach their potential. Our mission is to radically change education, transforming the lives of children by providing reading interventions and solutions to help them succeed academically, build self-confidence, and thrive in school and beyond. In the US, 65% of fourth graders read below proficiency and are 400% more likely to drop-out of high school. For most “at risk” students (students of color, low income, English Language Learners and students with learning disabilities) the problem is even more acute.

Learning Ally seeks to break this cycle. With early student assessment, intervention and accommodation and professional development for educators, Learning Ally can identify and prevent learning issues by working with schools and educators to support new and struggling readers. Our solutions build a strong foundation for independent, engaged learners who are empowered to achieve socially, emotionally, and academically, regardless of background or learning difference.

Founded in 1948 as Recording for the Blind, to help soldiers who lost their sight in combat continue their education with audiobook products, Learning Ally has evolved to help individuals understand the unique ways they learn and match them to the solutions that enable personal achievement. Today, Learning Ally reaches over 1,500,000 students, 200,000 educators and 18,550 schools across the country and continues to expand its reach. With a continued commitment to supporting students who learn differently, Learning Ally has joined researchers and neuroscientists from renowned institutions including UCSF and MIT, to better understand and address learning issues. You will find that our culture is one that is very committed to our mission, innovation, professional growth, and diversity, equity, and inclusion.

Position Overview

Duties and Responsibilities

The Project Manager is responsible for the production of audiobook projects from selection through completion. The PM collaborates with the Solutions team on product expectations and deadlines for completion. The PM owns delivery of finished products that meet quality and turnaround expectations, creating individual project plans and leading project teams to deliver results with high certainty.

Responsibilities include, but not limited to:

• Participate in defining product specifications.
• Create project plans to meet deadlines.
• Lead multiple project teams running concurrently.
• Provide on-going encouragement and recognition to project teams.
• Problem-solve, anticipate, and mitigate risk factors through project completion.
• Share successes and failures to drive continuous improvement.

Leadership Behaviors

• Demonstrates Enterprise Leadership: Values strong relationships with other business functions in the organization. Appreciates and understands the impact of decisions on other parts of the business.
• Desire to grow: Demonstrates a desire to grow in career, and a willingness to take on bigger, more complex projects that will have a significant impact on the mission and on student lives.
• Adaptability/Dealing with Ambiguity: Is flexible and able to adapt to change. Can effectively cope with change, comfortably shift gears, and act without having the total picture.
• Decision making: Demonstrates confidence in ability to make good choices, while understanding that mistakes are part of learning. Able to push past the fear and understand that taking risks is necessary for growth.
• Listening and influencing: Demonstrates active listening, understanding and considering team members' perspectives before making team decisions.

Management Responsibilities

• Analyze student experience data to measure student impact and set goals to improve.
• Share successes and failures of projects and released products with other leaders to drive continuous improvement of our solutions.
• Responsible for contract management, reviewing and understanding any contractual obligations, including product requirements and delivery commitments. Provide updates to designated contract owners.

Who You Are:

Technical Skills Requirements

• 12+ months of project management experience
• 12+ months experience with project management tools and software
• Experience with Google apps on both desktop and mobile devices
• Experience with leading virtual teams and meetings

Successful Leadership Behaviors Experience

• Experience in leading and participating on cross-functional project teams
• Experience in problem solving; has taken ownership of problems, recognizing, communicating, and addressing before they create larger ones.
• Experience in using analytical abilities to analyze data and find meaning to support decisions and improvement efforts.

Managerial Responsibilities Experience

• Experience leading team members in supporting each other, as they make their individual and group contributions toward achieving the project goals.
• Experience and skills in managing conflict and team building.
• Comfortable leading concurrent projects.

• Dedicated to meeting expectations and deadlines with a sense of urgency.

Educational Background

• A four-year degree with 12 months of experience leading projects or an associate’s degree with 36 months of experience leading projects.

Reports to: AVP Operations

Learning Ally is an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability or veteran status.

QA Automation Engineer

Learning Ally is a leading nonprofit education solutions organization that transforms the lives of struggling learners by delivering proven literacy solutions that help students reach their potential. Its mission is to radically change education, transforming the lives of children by providing solutions based on the Whole Child Literacy System to help them succeed academically, build self-confidence, and thrive in school and beyond.

65% of fourth-graders read below proficiency and are 400% more likely to drop out of high school. And, for “most at risk” students (students of color, low income, English Language Learners, and students with learning disabilities) the problem is even more acute.

Learning Ally seeks to break this cycle. Our While Child Literacy System interacts at all levels of the educational system by simultaneously addressing the Whole Student and the Whole Educator.

To drive this goal, we are building and expanding our next-generation platform to enable a new portfolio of products and services that address a student’s cognitive, environmental, and literacy learning variables. Our goal is to create immersive digital learning experiences that help develop a student’s love of reading and support an educator’s understanding of their role in student success.

Our platform is built using microservices with APIs written in GraphQL and REST. We use Node.js and React and prefer typescript in our codebase. We deploy via Jenkins pipelines using Kubernetes on Amazon Web Services. That being said, we are not dogmatic and believe in using the best tool for the job.

We look for teammates who think about the platform and products holistically, build new services and features that are reliable and maintainable. If you are humble, curious, resourceful, and will challenge us to think differently about solutions, this is an incredible opportunity to drive change in education and improve how millions of students learn.

Role Description

Working collaboratively across the organization, the QA Automation Engineer is responsible for improving overall quality assurance outcomes and overseeing all aspects of software and product testing in support of Learning Ally’s goals. You will be responsible for the design, development, and execution of manual and automated tests to verify our software meets business or product requirements. The QA Automation Engineer seeks to continually improve our quality assurance practices to ensure that Learning Ally products—existing and new—meet or exceed industry standards.

Responsibilities

• Translate business requirements, design, and technical specifications into functional test plans and scripts, providing comprehensive test scenarios and test cases for the testing team.
• Lead and drive application testing process throughout the project lifecycle (including functional, integration, regression, and release testing), creating, executing, and evaluating manual and automated test cases and reporting test results. Isolate, replicate, and report quality issues to the development team/product owner and verify defect fixes.
• Monitor product/system performance post-launch to ensure optimal performance and proactively identify software defects.
• Establish and continuously improve quality assurance standards/practices for the organization, including quality assurance measures and testing techniques/standards.
• Validate applications and systems that meet design specifications and requirements using SQL Server database tools.
• Lead ongoing accessibility testing efforts, including working collaboratively with developers to proactively identify and remediate functions that do not meet Learning Ally’s accessibility standards.
• Foster a working environment that supports Learning Ally’s cultural values. Act as a role model and engage in discussions and feedback to ensure the intent of the culture statement is integrated into day-to-day activities, planning, and communications.

Skills and Experience

• 4+ years working in Quality Assurance and Software Development with experience in manual testing as well as automated testing of web applications and web services.
• Experience with automated testing tools such as Selenium, Cucumber, Leapwork, or similar tool, required
• Experience with .NET or Java, or other transferable object-oriented languages
• Competency with databases including MSSQL or MySQL
• Experience in software development lifecycle including defect resolution process
• Experience in Web Services/API test automation
• Experience with Selenium Web Driver using JAVA to test front-end web-based applications
• Experience in test automation and proficiency creating automated unit, build, and regression test suites
• Familiarity with CI/CD concept and tools such as Jenkins, Docker
• Candidates must have strong analytical ability and communication skills
• Experience executing and evaluating load test results

About Learning Ally

Founded in 1948 as Recording for the Blind, to help soldiers who lost their sight in combat continue their education with audiobook products, Learning Ally has evolved to help individuals understand the unique ways they learn and match them to the solutions that enable personal achievement.

Today, Learning Ally reaches over 1,600,000 students, 260,000 educators, and 21,600 schools across the country and continues to expand its reach. With a continued commitment to supporting students who learn differently, Learning Ally has joined researchers and neuroscientists from renowned institutions including UCSF and MIT, to better understand and address learning issues. You will find that our culture is one that is very committed to our mission, innovation, professional growth, diversity, equity, and inclusion.

Learning Ally is an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability, or veteran status.

Sr. QA Automation Engineer

Learning Ally is a leading nonprofit education solutions organization that transforms the lives of struggling learners by delivering proven literacy solutions that help students reach their potential. Its mission is to radically change education, transforming the lives of children by providing solutions based on the Whole Child Literacy System to help them succeed academically, build self-confidence, and thrive in school and beyond.

65% of fourth-graders read below proficiency and are 400% more likely to drop out of high school. And, for “most at risk” students (students of color, low income, English Language Learners, and students with learning disabilities) the problem is even more acute.

Learning Ally seeks to break this cycle. Our While Child Literacy System interacts at all levels of the educational system by simultaneously addressing the Whole Student and the Whole Educator.

To drive this goal, we are building and expanding our next-generation platform to enable a new portfolio of products and services that address a student’s cognitive, environmental, and literacy learning variables. Our goal is to create immersive digital learning experiences that help develop a student’s love of reading and support an educator’s understanding of their role in student success.

Our platform is built using microservices with APIs written in GraphQL and REST. We use Node.js and React and prefer typescript in our codebase. We deploy via Jenkins pipelines using Kubernetes on Amazon Web Services. That being said, we are not dogmatic and believe in using the best tool for the job.

We look for teammates who think about the platform and products holistically, build new services and features that are reliable and maintainable. If you are humble, curious, resourceful, and will challenge us to think differently about solutions, this is an incredible opportunity to drive change in education and improve how millions of students learn.

Role Description

You are an experienced QA Automation Engineer with a track record of manual and automated testing across a variety of platforms. Having a good understanding of current testing philosophies for all phases of the software development lifecycle you are ready to establish a best-in-class QA practice for Learning Ally. You are an expert in automation platforms and are ready to design and build from the ground up. You understand how to collaborate closely with engineering teams and business stakeholders and have a true ownership-oriented mindset, an extremely high bar for quality output, and are excited by the prospect of working at a rapidly growing organization.

Responsibilities

• Build a robust and impactful test automation framework leveraged across multiple teams

• Evolve/maintain the testing infrastructure once built
• Develop test cases, plans, and procedures for various types of testing
• Work closely with business stakeholders and engineers to plan, develop and execute test coverage across all apps and platforms.
• Provide leadership to the QA team by developing and empowering staff, cultivating relationships, putting staff in a position to succeed, meeting their personal career goals while also achieving organizational goals
• Engage in daily oversight and guidance of problem requests, prioritization, corrective and preventive actions, and change controls to deliver customer satisfaction.
• Manage operational performance by identification, monitoring, and trending of quality metrics
• Assist with external and internal audits
• Lead ongoing accessibility testing efforts, including working collaboratively with developers to proactively identify and remediate functions that do not meet Learning Ally’s accessibility standards.
• Foster a working environment that supports Learning Ally’s cultural values. Act as a role model and engage in discussions and feedback to ensure the intent of the culture statement is integrated into day-to-day activities, planning, and communications.

Skills and Experience

• 6+ years working in Quality Assurance and Software Development with experience in manual testing as well as automated testing of web applications and web services.
• 4+ years of experience with API testing tools and UI automation tools
• 2+ years of leadership experience
• Experience with automated testing tools such as Selenium, Cucumber, Cypress, or similar tool, required
• Experience with Java, Javascript, C#, Python, or other transferable languages
• Competency with databases including MSSQL/MySQL/NoSQL
• Experience in software development lifecycle including defect resolution process
• Experience in Web Services/API test automation
• Experience with Selenium Web Driver using JAVA to test front-end web-based applications
• Experience in test automation and proficiency creating automated unit, build, and regression test suites
• Experience leading conversations with customers and business stakeholders
• Ability to work with diverse teams, guide teams through decision making, facilitate agreement, build collaborative relationships, and focus on customer needs
• Candidates must have proven analytical ability and strong communication skills
• Experience executing and evaluating load test results

About Learning Ally

Founded in 1948 as Recording for the Blind, to help soldiers who lost their sight in combat continue their education with audiobook products, Learning Ally has evolved to help individuals understand the unique ways they learn and match them to the solutions that enable personal achievement.

Today, Learning Ally reaches over 1,600,000 students, 260,000 educators, and 21,600 schools across the country and continues to expand its reach. With a continued commitment to supporting students who learn differently, Learning Ally has joined researchers and neuroscientists from renowned institutions including UCSF and MIT, to better understand and address learning issues. You will find that our culture is one that is very committed to our mission, innovation, professional growth, diversity, equity, and inclusion.

Learning Ally is an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability, or veteran status.

Director of Research and Design

Context:

Learning Ally is a leading nonprofit education solutions organization that transforms the lives of struggling learners by delivering proven literacy solutions that help students reach their potential. Its mission is to radically change education, transforming the lives of children by providing reading interventions and solutions to help them succeed academically, build self-confidence, and thrive in school and beyond.

65% of fourth graders read below proficiency and are 400% more likely to drop-out of high school. And, for “most at risk” students (students of color, low income, English Language Learners and students with learning disabilities) the problem is even more acute.

Learning Ally seeks to break this cycle. With early student assessment, intervention and accommodation and professional development for educators, Learning Ally can identify and prevent learning issues by working with schools and educators to support new and struggling readers. Our solutions build a strong foundation for independent, engaged learners who are empowered to achieve socially, emotionally, and academically, regardless of background or learning difference.

Founded in 1948 as Recording for the Blind, to help soldiers who lost their sight in combat continue their education with audiobook products, Learning Ally has evolved to help individuals understand the unique ways they learn and match them to the solutions that enable personal achievement.

Today, Learning Ally reaches over 1,600,000 students, 260,000 educators and 21,600 schools across the country and continues to expand its reach. With a continued commitment to supporting students who learn differently, Learning Ally has joined researchers and neuroscientists from renowned institutions including UCSF and MIT, to better understand and address learning issues. You will find that our culture is one that is very committed to our mission, innovation, professional growth, and diversity, equity, and inclusion.

Role Description:

We are looking for an experienced and strategic design leader to bolster learning ally’s design and research abilities. As the leader of design, you’ll play a pivotal role in defining and designing the experience of millions of students and educators—taking science-based practices and making them accessible, engaging, and joyful for the many stakeholders (students, guardians, teachers, school administrators and more) in the reading education system. You will set the standard for quality research—developing the practices that ensure that our products are built on solid insights, and on those insights with high quality product and service design.

Responsibilities:

• Guiding design practice: Responsible for design, including design research, practices across the product team. You will outline best practices and guidelines for product managers, UX designers, and more and coach and mentor those conducting design research to evolve, integrate, or develop new products and services.
• Establishing design principles: Develop a point-of-view to guide product design ideals and standards and roll out an understanding of these principles to key stakeholders such as Marketing and Data Science/Research. You will be responsible for ensuring that products and solutions deliver a high quality experience that delivers on Learning Ally’s values.
• Leading strategic projects: Regularly lead and project manage important strategic projects centered in design research and discovering product-market fit.
• Team building: lead, hire, and develop those on the design team—most notably those with UX and design research capabilities. You will also manage vendors to supplement design research efforts.
• Design operations: create or manage the development of design systems, library and other processes and assets to drive quality, consistency and efficiency of design processes
• Design guidance and critique: Oversee design across the product portfolio to guide and provide perspective towards elegant, functional, and aesthetically pleasing visual and experiential design across the Learning Ally portfolio of offers.
• Lead by Example: leading a small scrappy team, you’ll need to roll up your sleeves and get involved directly in research and design activities as you grow your team in proportion with the business.

Skills and Experience:

• 7+ years of experience in product design or similar. You are comfortable developing elegant, considered products and services that are grounded in user insight and data. You are comfortable creating and guiding the creation of design assets like user flows, architectures, storyboards, and screens.
• UX design: you stay up to date on best UI, UX, and service design practices. You frequently are able to find solutions to tough UX challenges and coach others to do so as well. You have a high bar for quality design, both from a usability and aesthetic perspective and are able to roll up your sleeves to execute to that standard when needed.
• You are skilled and experienced in how to use a wide array of prototypes (from wireframes, to click-throughs, to storyboards, and marketing assets) to derive insight on real behaviors and mindsets of customers and other stakeholders.
• 3+ years of experience practicing ethnographic and/or design research with regularity
• Experience shipping product. You understand the challenges of building a market-ready products. You’ve worked with product managers to phase work and prioritize features to maximize speed to market while delivering a great customer experience.
• People management: You have experience and care deeply about building a skilled, motivated, and fulfilled team

Learning Ally is an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability or veteran status.

Director of UX and Design

Context:

Learning Ally is a leading nonprofit education solutions organization that transforms the lives of struggling learners by delivering proven literacy solutions that help students reach their potential. Its mission is to radically change education, transforming the lives of children by providing reading interventions and solutions to help them succeed academically, build self-confidence, and thrive in school and beyond.

65% of fourth graders read below proficiency and are 400% more likely to drop-out of high school. And, for “most at risk” students (students of color, low income, English Language Learners and students with learning disabilities) the problem is even more acute.

Learning Ally seeks to break this cycle. With early student assessment, intervention and accommodation and professional development for educators, Learning Ally can identify and prevent learning issues by working with schools and educators to support new and struggling readers. Our solutions build a strong foundation for independent, engaged learners who are empowered to achieve socially, emotionally, and academically, regardless of background or learning difference.

Founded in 1948 as Recording for the Blind, to help soldiers who lost their sight in combat continue their education with audiobook products, Learning Ally has evolved to help individuals understand the unique ways they learn and match them to the solutions that enable personal achievement.

Today, Learning Ally reaches over 1,600,000 students, 260,000 educators and 21,600 schools across the country and continues to expand its reach. With a continued commitment to supporting students who learn differently, Learning Ally has joined researchers and neuroscientists from renowned institutions including UCSF and MIT, to better understand and address learning issues. You will find that our culture is one that is very committed to our mission, innovation, professional growth, and diversity, equity, and inclusion.

Role Description:

We are looking for an experienced and strategic design leader to bolster learning ally’s design and research abilities. As the leader of design, you’ll play a pivotal role in defining and designing the experience of millions of students and educators—taking science-based practices and making them accessible, engaging, and joyful for the many stakeholders (students, guardians, teachers, school administrators and more) in the reading education system. You will set the standard for quality research—developing the practices that ensure that our products are built on solid insights, and on those insights with high quality product and service design.

Responsibilities:

• Guiding design practice: Responsible for design, including design research, practices across the product team. You will outline best practices and guidelines for product managers, UX designers, and more and coach and mentor those conducting design research to evolve, integrate, or develop new products and services.
• Establishing design principles: Develop a point-of-view to guide product design ideals and standards and roll out an understanding of these principles to key stakeholders such as Marketing and Data Science/Research. You will be responsible for ensuring that products and solutions deliver a high quality experience that delivers on Learning Ally’s values.
• Leading strategic projects: Regularly lead and project manage important strategic projects centered in design research and discovering product-market fit.
• Team building: lead, hire, and develop those on the design team—most notably those with UX and design research capabilities. You will also manage vendors to supplement design research efforts.
• Design operations: create or manage the development of design systems, library and other processes and assets to drive quality, consistency and efficiency of design processes
• Design guidance and critique: Oversee design across the product portfolio to guide and provide perspective towards elegant, functional, and aesthetically pleasing visual and experiential design across the Learning Ally portfolio of offers.
• Lead by Example: leading a small scrappy team, you’ll need to roll up your sleeves and get involved directly in research and design activities as you grow your team in proportion with the business.

Skills and Experience:

• 7+ years of experience in product design or similar. You are comfortable developing elegant, considered products and services that are grounded in user insight and data. You are comfortable creating and guiding the creation of design assets like user flows, architectures, storyboards, and screens.
• UX design: you stay up to date on best UI, UX, and service design practices. You frequently are able to find solutions to tough UX challenges and coach others to do so as well. You have a high bar for quality design, both from a usability and aesthetic perspective and are able to roll up your sleeves to execute to that standard when needed.
• You are skilled and experienced in how to use a wide array of prototypes (from wireframes, to click-throughs, to storyboards, and marketing assets) to derive insight on real behaviors and mindsets of customers and other stakeholders.
• 3+ years of experience practicing ethnographic and/or design research with regularity
• Experience shipping product. You understand the challenges of building a market-ready products. You’ve worked with product managers to phase work and prioritize features to maximize speed to market while delivering a great customer experience.
• People management: You have experience and care deeply about building a skilled, motivated, and fulfilled team

Learning Ally is an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability or veteran status.

Sr. Digital Marketing Manager

Context:

Learning Ally is a leading nonprofit education solutions organization that transforms the lives of struggling learners by delivering proven literacy solutions that help students reach their potential. Its mission is to radically change education, transforming the lives of children by providing reading interventions and solutions to help them succeed academically, build self-confidence, and thrive in school and beyond.

65% of fourth graders read below proficiency and are 400% more likely to drop-out of high school. And, for “most at risk” students (students of color, low income, English Language Learners and students with learning disabilities) the problem is even more acute.

Learning Ally seeks to break this cycle. With early student assessment, intervention and accommodation and professional development for educators, Learning Ally can identify and prevent learning issues by working with schools and educators to support new and struggling readers. Our solutions build a strong foundation for independent, engaged learners who are empowered to achieve socially, emotionally, and academically, regardless of background or learning difference.

Founded in 1948 as Recording for the Blind, to help soldiers who lost their sight in combat continue their education with audiobook products, Learning Ally has evolved to help individuals understand the unique ways they learn and match them to the solutions that enable personal achievement.

Today, Learning Ally reaches over 1,600,000 students, 260,000 educators and 21,600 schools across the country and continues to expand its reach. With a continued commitment to supporting students who learn differently, Learning Ally has joined researchers and neuroscientists from renowned institutions including UCSF and MIT, to better understand and address learning issues. You will find that our culture is one that is very committed to our mission, innovation, professional growth, and diversity, equity, and inclusion.

The Digital Marketing Manager, sits in the Marketing Operations arm, will report to the Marketing Director, Operations and is responsible for overseeing, managing, and implementing strategic web and digital initiatives. This includes the project management of a web CMS transition, the ongoing development and updating of online content, and the integration with various data systems for data capture and lead scoring. The role will also include the marketing operations for the Learning Ally Spotlight Learning Series, planning, managing, and implementing the customer experience, including the outbound campaigns, the web presence, the registration process, and ongoing CRM. With a fast-paced growth organization, this manager will need to understand how to effectively manage and support a portfolio of media campaigns for efficiency and effectiveness using strong analytics consisting of dashboards of leading indicators, KPIs, ROIs to best allocate resources to build operational excellence to drive growth.

Responsibilities

• Campaign management - set marketing goals, campaign priorities, and plan and implement initiatives to achieve goals.
• Project management - oversee and provide a roadmap for project schedules for digital projects to manage programs to deadlines. Identify key dependencies and work closely with them to achieve integration and ensure safe delivery of the program.
• Understanding new marketing, web and technology trends including customer segmentation and platforms related to the projects.
• Work closely with cross-functional teams including the solutions and technology organizations to optimize marketing campaigns to maximize revenue conversion

Qualifications

• Strong project management and organizational skills to facilitate managing complex projects and key stakeholders. Must be detail oriented and know how to keep a project running smoothly to meet deadlines and objectives.
• Knowledge of the following systems: Marketo and other CRM systems, DNN and other CMS systems, Google Analytics, Social Media Platforms
• Understanding of Marketing processes, digital marketing, and customer lifecycle management.
• Experience managing digital media plans and virtual events. Monitoring initiatives and optimizing them to their best performance.
• Ability to effectively present information and respond to questions from groups and individuals of all levels of management and employees.
• Proven problem-solving resolution skills with the ability to work effectively in a deadline-driven work environment, where multitasking while maintaining quality and attention to detail is the norm.
• Bachelors’ degree or 7 years related work experience/or equivalent combination of education and experience.

Core Competencies

• Conceiving, designing and implementing digital marketing strategies across web, social media events and other social medial platforms
• Directing inter departmental workstreams
• Managing freelancers and vendors
• Strong operational and organizational skills: Ability to maintain alignment of key stakeholders and cross departmental working teams to meet goals.
• Technical expertise: Facility in navigating various technical platforms. Comfortable applying strategic objectives to new platforms to achieve results.
• Dealing with ambiguity: Can effectively manage change, be flexible, pivot when necessary, and know when it’s appropriate to do so.
• Creativity: Comes up with new and innovative ideas for marketing operations and for problem solving.
• Customer Focus: Is dedicated and successful at identifying and meeting the needs of internal and external customers.
• Communication and Writing Skills: Can effectively communicate ideas and information in written and verbal forms.
• Perseverance - Pursues everything with energy, drive, and a need to finish; seldom gives up before finishing, especially in the face of resistance or setbacks.
• Listening - Practices attentive and active listening; has the patience to hear people out; can accurately restate the opinions of others even when he/she disagrees.
• Interpersonal Savvy - Relates well to all kinds of people, up, down, and sideways, inside and outside the organization; builds constructive and effective relationships; uses diplomacy and tact; can diffuse even high-tension situations comfortably.

Learning Ally is an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability or veteran status.