Director of Engineering

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About Us

The Story of Village Book Builders starts with the simple love of books. Books encourage us to think critically, build empathy, imagine moonshots and help us build brighter futures together. Unfortunately, not all children have access to quality educational resources and the dearth of books is just the beginning of a vicious cycle.

This is why we created Village Book Builders: A non-profit aiming to help communities re-establish learning cultures through access to safe local libraries, books, technology, and 1:1 student mentorship. Today we call this Hope Through Books .

First runner-up in Stanford Longevity Design Challenge (2020), the Engineering division of Village Book Builders is looking for self-starter interns & volunteers passionate about making a difference by leveraging their core competencies.

About this Position

• This is an M2 level position reporting to the Chief Impact Officer with a flexible schedule regarding hours/days and averages 20+ hours / week
• You can work remotely from anywhere in the world and lead a team of volunteers & interns passionate about making a difference
• Engineering headcount is around 20~25 throughout the year and can reach 50 in summer
• Additional 32 student developers contribute externally in partnership with a bootcamp

Qualifications

• Ability to commit to the position for a minimum of 6 months, preferably longer
• Past leadership experience, preferably in a global context
• Formal or informal learning experience in Engineering, Computer Science, Product Development or related field
• Domain expertise in at least one (and preferably two) of our projects (listed below)
• Lived experience or demonstrated understanding of the strengths & challenges of any rural community in developing countries
• Past experience in scaling up open source projects is an added bonus
• Past experience in developing educational technology is an added advantage

Our Projects

Project 1: Village Portal

Village Portal is a global school-based mentoring and intervention management solution. The primary goal is to connect mentors with mentees while also serving as an interface for mentor advisors, headmasters, teachers and parents. The WebApp was first developed & launched last summer by undergraduate interns and has recently been re-engineered by working professionals in line with open source best practices. You will be leading the next development cycle focused on the mentor advisor and headmaster interface with a team of software developers to improve the experience and quality of mentoring and education in rural communities of Africa, Asia & Latin America.

Tech Stack - React, Redux, Ant Design, Django, Django REST .

Project 2: Data Science & Visualization

Operating a digital-first organization at a global level generates a multitude of data trails. However, the majority of this data is siloed in various in-house or 3rd party SaaS applications. Our goal is to collate and cross reference data from these disparate sources in order to build a 360° view of the organization’s impact and operational health. You will help change the way nonprofits monitor and report their impact by moving away from active data sources (such as surveys & assessments) which requires huge investments of volunteer and beneficiary time, efforts.

Tech Stack - SQL, Metabase, Google Dev APIs, nginx, Oracle DB, PostgreSQL.

Project 3: IT Operations

Our organization builds economically sustainable libraries with digital & physical learning infrastructure in rural communities. It also provides year-round virtual mentorship for kids in these communities. Business use-cases from both these fronts are supported by ITOps which includes customizing open-source & proprietary software, remotely managing hundreds of computers, setting up servers & data pipelines, leveraging 3rd party cognitive APIs and building solutions to bridge language barriers and Internet accessibility.

Tech Stack - Jack of all trades in Computer Science & Communication Engineering .