2018 Jun 16: We will close this particular posting Saturday, June 23, 11:59PM Pacific.

My team at Desmos is hiring!

You should share that link with anyone who might be a good fit for the work. Alternately, if you think you’re a good fit for the work, you should guard that posting with your life, share it with nobody, and start thinking about your cover letter.

Why you should apply is really simple:

Desmos is the best place to do great work in math edtech right now and for the foreseeable future.

Here are six reasons I’m pulling out of muscle memory. I’m not even thinking about them. Ask me in ten minutes and I’ll give you six more just as fast.

• Teachers and students love our work. Check our Twitter feed. Also we just wrapped up a pilot study of 44 teachers using our activities and the results exceeded all of our expectations.
• Desmos folk are enormously talented in their own areas, curious and humble in all the others. So while my team didn’t come to Desmos having studied the same fields as our software developers and product designers (or vice versa) we’re conversationally fluent in each other’s work and humble about the limitations of that fluency. That disposition results in extremely enjoyable and productive collaboration.
• Great work-life balance. Startups are notoriously unfriendly to families but all of the full-time folk on my team have a couple of kids or more. Each one will tell you they love Desmos’s flexibility to do their best work at negotiable hours and locations.
• Everyone at Desmos is really satisfied with how we handle meetings and remote work, according to an internal company survey earlier this month. That’s uncommon.
• Strong financial position. While other edtech companies take on as much venture capital as they can, mortgaging their ability to make important decisions for themselves, Desmos has worked hard to minimize its reliance on outside investment. The result is that my team has had time and freedom to make decisions, first, based on what works for math students and, second, based on what we can sell. (Example: we decided to invest heavily in making our graphing calculator accessible to vision-impaired students because we thought that reducing an impediment to mathematical thinking sounded like a really good idea. Afterwards, we turned that work into contracts with eighteen states with more on the way.)
• Glassdoor reviews that speak for themselves.

We’ve spent several years tuning up our model for math, education, and technology. We studied it over the last three months and various aspects have clicked right into place. Demand is heating up for that work so we’re looking for people to help us build.

So please check out the posting and think about applying or sending it to someone you know.

BTW. If the formatting of the job posting seems atypical, it’s because we spent a lot of time discussing Lever’s blog series on reducing hiring bias. It would be easy to write a list of required credentials based on our mental profile of an ideal candidate. But that mental profile would be extremely susceptible to implicit and explicit biases. Lever received more responses from a more diverse group of candidates when they focused less on their credentials and more on what they’d need to know for the work and what they’d do at different milestones in their first year.

For example, an earlier draft of our posting required “at least five years of teaching experience at grades 6-12,” which isn’t bad as far as credentials go, but we realized it’s really just a proxy for the first four bullets beneath “What you should show up ready to teach anyone on your first day.”

• What a day in the life of a public middle- or high-school teacher looks like in the United States.
• The major challenges of technology integration in US classrooms from the perspective of both students and teachers.
• What separates a great math lesson from a lousy math lesson.
• What separates great classroom technology from lousy classroom technology.

We’re grateful to Lever for opening up their hiring practices to the public.