Slang
Engineering Intern (Junior Developer)
We’re looking for talented individuals interested in joining a growing global company. At Slang, you’ll be an early team member of a global, well-funded startup spun out from MIT. We’re building a world-class team to revolutionize language learning with cutting-edge technology and delightful design.
What we’re working on at Slang
Slang started at MIT as a research project on using AI and NLP to make learning a new language as efficient as possible. Our technology powers a highly adaptive e-learning platform that offers an unprecedented variety of specialized English courses and proficiency tests for career development in over one hundred fields like Sales, Finance, Logistics, Medicine, and Law. With just a small team, we’ve already created the largest professional English offering in the world. Now, we’re scaling up to release 1,000 more courses over the next three years.
What this role is about
In this role, you’ll be involved in both product development and company strategy — you’ll support the research, design, and development of new features and you’ll help us refine our product roadmap. We have tens of thousands of active users and many subproblems in language learning to tackle. Our codebase is built with best practices in mind and our product is designed with proper UI/UX at the forefront of development. The work we’re facing encompasses front-end and back-end web development, hybrid mobile development, and data-heavy modeling and algorithmic tasks. Some of our technology comes from the open-source community, so be prepared to contribute back!
Some interesting problems we’re tackling
- How can we design the learning experience to communicate the power of the advanced data-science deciding the particular sequence of activities a user sees while maintaining simplicity and intuitiveness?
- How should we architect our database to support the growing number of activities our users submit every week (currently at more than a million per week)?
- How can we aggregate and communicate the learning statistics of a company’s employees for display to their managers?
Requirements
- University approval to do your internship
- Pursuing a degree in Systems, Computer or Electronic Engineering
- Interest to learn about or experience in full-stack web development, including…
- … Modern web API stacks and related technologies, with a preference for Ruby on Rails experience.
- … Modern web UI stacks and related technologies, with a preference for React, TypeScript, and PostCSS experience.
- … Integrating these UI and API stacks together and maintaining full-stack applications.
- … Database technologies, data structures, and related optimization. We currently deal with large amounts of data in PostgreSQL and Redis.
- A strong desire to maintain a clean, reliable, maintainable, and efficient codebase.
- An eye for design. We’re big on UI/UX here, so a good aesthetic sense is important.
- Excellent discipline and focus, especially in autonomous environments, and strong English communication skills. We’re a small team and we’re moving quick!
- A plus: interest or experience with computational linguistics, natural-language processing (NLP), language-learning, speech recognition, data science, or machine learning.
What Slang can offer you
Our compensation package includes a competitive salary and excellent benefits (details vary by country).
Most importantly, we offer the special experience of being part of a fast-moving and quickly growing international company within the entrepreneurial ecosystems of Boston and MIT.
Where we're located
Our team is currently split between the United States, Mexico, Brazil, Colombia, and Nigeria. We are recruiting great people in these locations and all around the world.
Interested?
We'd love to hear from you — apply below!
Slang is an equal opportunity employer. We celebrate diversity and are committed to our inclusive and healthy environment.
For further information related to Slang, check out recent pieces profiling us in Bloomberg, LABS, and Forbes; the portfolios of our investors, Social Capital, an investor in companies like Slack and Intercom; DILA Capital, Alive Ventures, Salesforce Ventures and Roble Ventures; our Crunchbase profile; and the profiles of our founders, Diego and Kamran. We're also worldwide winners of LearnLaunch and the GESAwards, huge achievements of which we're very proud of.
Slang is the largest platform for learning professional and specialized English. We help people, companies, and universities go beyond basic English.
- Founded
- Founded 2013
- Employees
- 11-50 employees
- Industry
- Internet Software & Services
Junior Developer