The Role

Mystery.org (YC ’17) has created the fastest growing science curriculum in the United States. We're already regularly used by teachers in more than 20% of elementary schools in the country. We're creating more problem solvers through inspiring children to love science. 

This is a rare opportunity to join an early-stage company that is improving the world, receives unsolicited “thank you” notes from its users every day for making their lives better, and is already profitable.

We are looking for a Software Engineer to join our Growth team. The Growth Team is responsible for coming up with new ways to get teachers to sign up for and teach on our platform. In this role, you’ll be responsible for coming up with ideas that could grow our product, implementing them, and evaluating the impact. 

Day-to-day

In this role you’ll report to our Director of Growth, Huey Kwik. You’ll work closely with him, our whole product team, and our CEO—we are very collaborative in our product experimenting and analysis. Our team’s experience with growth and data comes from Facebook and Google, with many years of experience optimizing conversion funnels. Help us create more problem solvers by bringing a better science education to 25 million kids. 

Engineers have a seat at the table for all decisions in the company. You’ll work alongside a strong engineering team that obsesses over customer feedback and is constantly iterating to improve based on what we hear. We release multiple updates to our website every day and implement new features days after conceiving of them. Our current stack is postgres-heroku-rails.

We are headquartered in San Francisco, but this position is open to both local and remote candidates.

Package & Perks

If you’re looking for the basics:

…but the real perks of working at Mystery.org are the quality of the people on your team and the problem we’re solving. Those things are what bring us to work every day.

We started Mystery.org to create better explanations for every question children have about the world. We began with the 150 most common science questions that children ask teachers. We call this collection Mystery Science. Last year, more than 4 million children used Mystery Science in 50% of U.S. elementary schools. 

We’re now moving on to all the other questions children have that they’ll never learn in school. In the last 18 months we received over 500,000 questions from children eager for better explanations of the world.  Now we’re creating video explanations for every question. You can think of this like a visual Wikipedia for kids.

Our goal is to create a generation of better thinkers. We think this is the most important problem to solve in the world today.

Mystery.org was started by two long-time friends, Doug Peltz and Keith Schacht. Doug was a master classroom teacher, a science department head, and the creator of an original science curriculum that made science the most popular subject at his school. Keith Schacht, our CEO, has started and sold three technology companies, was a product manager at Facebook, and a TED speaker. We’re backed by a great group of investors including Y Combinator, Learn Capital, and Reach Capital.

On your first day at Mystery.org, you’ll meet a team of people who are passionate about science and teaching, and who each love their respective crafts. Our co-founder, Doug Peltz, began by assembling the best science explainers in the world from the Exploratorium, Klutz, LePort Schools, Stanford, and The Field Museum. Our focus on people extends to every area of the company. We’re building the team that we want to work with.

We are a product-driven company. The core of what we do is create an incredible product that our customers love. We test every science activity, observe every explanation with children, and talk with teachers constantly. We take our responsibility to envision the future of learning very seriously and we want to bring the best science education to every child in the world. This is an opportunity to join a startup and transform science education for the next generation of children.

Inspired?

If you’re an experienced Software Engineer with deep experience helping grow products and want to be an early member of our Growth Team, let’s talk.