Covid forever changed education. Come be a part of the evolution.
In the winter of 2020, hundreds of thousands of educators were unexpectedly faced with the prospect of teaching online, something many of them hadn’t ever done before.
They weren’t the only ones ill-prepared for this shift either. Universities grappled with how students with poor Internet connections would access their learning materials; how physical assets, libraries, and writing centres could be leveraged; and how proctored exams would be administered.
COVID-19 upended the entire industry, but fortunately the engineering team at Aula was ready to rise to the challenge. To better deliver teaching and learning content to students, CPO Kyle Deterding and I had already made some big changes to our product, building off of momentum from a move to severless in 2019. The prospect of our Daily Active Users tripling or even 10xing on a given day didn’t really keep us up at night, which is great considering what 2020 had in store for higher education.
Seemingly overnight Aula’s mission expanded from “how do we make online learning more engaging?” to “how can we deliver the optimal learning experience at scale?” We knew the answer had to start with the educator experience. Applying our scrappy, whatever-it-takes approach, we spun up operations to support thousands of educators who needed to transform their learning materials. We helped them transition from a model that worked best for in-person delivery to a format that was better suited for hybrid or online-only learning, where students could still feel connected to each other even when separated physically. Aula’s efforts have prevented hundreds of students from dropping out, and your contributions will positively impact thousands more.
This seismic shift both in education — and within our company — has brought all kinds of challenges to our team over these past several months. Product capabilities that were less important when our users were using Aula on campus, and able to interact in-person, suddenly became acutely painful. And while our decision to go serverless has paid off, other key projects — like optimizing our database performance during peak activity — need prompt attention.
While Aula has covered a lot of ground this year, the problems facing higher education are far from solved. The pandemic accelerated the arrival of the future. Institutions thought they had 10 years to get to a high-quality, sustainable hybrid or online-only delivery model, and it turned out that they had about 10 days to get everything in order. Aula has stretched, changed, adapted, and even cracked in a few places where we were getting in our own way. We’ve persevered, but the work continues. And that’s where you come in.
As I take on more responsibilities at Aula, I’m currently hiring a #2 to lead our engineering team and steer us through the next set of exciting challenges. Though we’ve quelled most of our compute scaling concerns, taking a system designed to do hundreds of things and tasking it to do thousands presents the kinds of problems most of us read about but don’t often get to experience ourselves. If you appreciate being challenged, then Aula is the right place for you.
Aula is a product company above all else, and everything we build is in service to our end users. Our engineering leaders have a seat at the table during product discovery processes, and this engineering leadership role will be complemented by peers across product development. I’m looking for someone who can lead strategy meetings, coach senior engineers, and step into exec meetings. Equally important are the people, process, and technology skills you’ve developed over your career. In general, you’ll be asked to scale a team within a dynamic startup environment, know where to place big technology bets and be prepared for our user numbers to double again.
The culture of our engineering team has always been rooted in what you might describe as “extreme care.” We’re not afraid to get into the Feelings Zone and make sure we appreciate and support each other on a human level. Doing this helps create psychological safety on our team, an environment that doesn’t penalize mistakes, and a workplace where you trust the team will have your back — even when someone might have backed themselves into a corner. Read more about how we run a fully distributed company here.
So if you’re a mission-driven engineering leader with a high EQ who wants to positively impact students’ lives while helping the dev team do their very best work, I invite you to apply for the role. Times like these call for Aula — and someone like you.
