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    Synthesis is looking for a Engineering Manager

    Education is about the future: how do we make the future better than the present, how do we preserve the advances we have made so far, and how do we continue to expand the frontiers of human knowledge and capability?

    The highest leverage tactic is to focus on childhood education. That’s what we’re doing at Synthesis. Specifically, our mission is to cultivate a generation of supercollaborators –… people who can work together effectively to take on humanity’s most complex and vexing challenges.

    We’re looking for people with exceptional intelligence, work ethic, and integrity to join us.

    About Synthesis

    Co-founder Josh Dahn built Ad Astra school for Elon’s kids at SpaceX. Now, we are scaling the most ambitious ideas from Ad Astra, starting with the most innovative class: Synthesis.

    Synthesis teaches kids to collaboratively work with information like adults do. Students ages 6 to 14 meet once a week to form teams and play novel, complex games and simulations, moderated by an adult coach who encourages clear communication and rigorous analytical thinking. And that is just the beginning. We're building "Ender's Game for innovators", a global internet-native academy to accelerate learning for the world's most talented and driven students, those most likely to contribute to leaps in science and engineering that advance human progress.

    Recently, we raised $12M from Balaji S. Srinivasan (@balajis) and Amjad Masad (founder of Replit).

    Synthesis is a purely remote team who, in addition to Ad Astra, have built Khan Academy, ClassDojo, Facebook, Google, Uber, Roam Research, and Flexport.

    You:

    • Are energized by mentoring and growing fearsome engineers.
    • Have exceptional communication and collaboration skills, and are excited by the challenge of supporting a purely remote team.
    • Have experience leading from the front: you aren’t afraid to get your hands dirty, but also know how to make space for your team members to grow.
    • Have technical chops from your previous life as a senior-level software engineer.
    • Pragmatically balance product and technical tradeoffs.
    • Sweat the details and take pride in your craft.
    • Think critically about product and build empathy with your users.
    • Are biased toward action. When you see problems, you fix them.
    • Work hours that are aligned with US (UTC-8 to UTC-4) or EU (UTC to UTC+3) business hours.

    You will:

    • Grow a high-performing team that owns their product and is empowered to build.
    • Develop the team so it works as a unit rather than a collection of individuals.
    • Support your team members with 1:1s, continuous feedback, and opportunities for career advancement.
    • Manage performance issues when necessary.
    • Build strong relationships with your peers, aligning your team’s technology and process with the wider org
    • As part of a team, be responsible for building applications that:
    • enable real-time audio/video collaboration
    • match players & teams by skill level
    • build a social network for Synthesis students
    • spark student self-reflection with game replays, recordings, and session highlights
    • autoscale game instance backends
    • Think big and ship iteratively.
    • Fine-tune your product intuition by TAing a cohort of real students.

    Next steps

    Apply below, and consider trying Rubicon (linked below) for a chance to skip straight to an intro call