History & Mission
Founded in 2014 in Montreal, Canada, by Philip Cutler and Roberto Cipriani, Paper is an educational support system (ESS) for K-12 schools across North America. The company’s fundamental mission is to bridge the gap between what schools provide and what students need to succeed. As a personalized learning platform that empowers all students and maximizes their lifetime potential, Paper’s team of vetted and trained educators offer 1:1 online tutoring for any subject, at any time. Students communicate with these educators about their challenges with classwork and solve their problems collaboratively via a rich, text-based environment.
Paper closed its first public school deal in 2018 and has subsequently signed numerous districts onto its platform. In 2019, Paper generated $1 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR) and exited 2022 with $68 million ARR. Paper has grown from 174 employees in 2019 to over 1800 employees currently (split between FTEs and Part-time Tutors).
Today, Paper serves more than 3 million students from over 400+ school districts across 40 US States and Canada with headquarters in both Montreal and Las Vegas. Paper integrates directly into a school district’s existing IT infrastructure and leverages technology to equip all students with personalized learning to maximize outcomes.
Solutions
The Paper ESS is comprised of three key solutions allowing each student to build a learning profile that is informed by data collected throughout their academic journey and augmented by the data of Paper’s growing network of learners across North America. Since its founding, the company has been optimizing its product and has evolved into a per-student annual subscription license that targets public school districts as the primary customer.
1. Personalized Tutoring: Paper provides students with 24/7 access to tutoring in any subject, anytime from anywhere. Various communication features (including text, voice notes, and a virtual whiteboard) ensure students have an experience that best suits their preferred learning style. Support is available in English, Spanish, French, & Mandarin.
2. Practice Center: Paper provides practice tools that support in-class and at-home academic practice in engaging formats that focus on their zone of proximal development, including Math, English, Language, Arts, and Reading fluency.
3. College and Career Readiness: Paper provides students with resources that prepare them for life after high school, including academic planning, college and career readiness tools, work-based learning, and micro-credentials. Paper helps ensure every student’s education leads to a successful career outcome, whether through a degree or going into the workforce.
Additionally, the company’s platform delivers a portal for teachers and administrators to gain data and analysis of a student’s competencies and progress.
Financial Sponsors
Since its founding, Paper has raised over $390 million in financing. In 2016, the company received $1.6 million in seed funding, led by Birchmere Ventures, followed by $7.5 million in a Series A round led by Reach Capital and Bullpen Capital, with participation from Google. In 2020, Paper raised an additional $11 million in funding led by Framework Venture Partners and Salesforce. In June of 2021, the company closed a $100 million Series C led by IVP, and the following year in 2022, Paper closed a Series D financing of $270 million led by Softbank and Sapphire Ventures.
The Opportunity
Paper grew at an incredibly rapid pace over the COVID-19 pandemic when the world experienced a sudden shift away from the classroom and forced rapid adoption of online learning, education, and virtual tutoring. Post-pandemic, with the democratization of Generative AI and the shift in federal funding, Paper is refocusing its efforts towards a path to profitability.
Job Summary
Job Description
Role Overview: Senior Data Engineer
Scale our data infrastructure, designing and implementing a near real-time analytics strategy to support our product and services. As a Senior Data Engineer in our team, you'll have the opportunity to play a critical role in helping us meet our goals by building and optimizing our data warehouse, developing and implementing advanced data processing pipelines, and mentoring other data engineers.
Responsibilities:
- Architect Event-Driven Data Warehouses: Design and implement data warehouse models using tools like BigQuery, dbt, Composer/Airflow, Datahub, and Terraform/Terragrunt.
- Develop Real-Time Data Transformation Pipelines: Create and maintain near real-time data transformation pipelines to ensure data accuracy and timeliness.
- Deploy Open-Source Data Tools: Utilize platforms like Composer/Airflow for workflow automation and orchestration, and Datahub for catalog and lineage management.
- Mentorship and Guidance: Provide technical mentorship to data engineers, promote best practices, conduct code reviews, pair programming and foster learning & collaboration.
Requirements for Success:
Mandatory skills
- Experience in designing Infrastructure as Code (IaC) framework for deploying and managing containerized data applications and promoting it from development to production
- Strong experience in modeling event-driven data warehouses/data lakes, using both traditional (i.e. star schema, snowflake schema) and modern (i.e. Wide tables - OBT, columnar storage, nested columns) approaches, being able to choose the best method for each use case
- Hands-on experience with batch orchestration tools like Airflow, Prefect, Dagster, etc.
- Practical hands-on expertise in designing and implementing near real-time data transformation pipelines with modern data lakes and warehouses such as BigQuery, using tools such as Pubsub/Kafka/ksqlDB
- Working knowledge of data transformation tools like DBT (Data Build Tool)
Nice-to-have
- Well-versed in cloud computing platforms like GCP, AWS, and Azure. Experience using GCP Pub/Sub with BigQuery subscriptions is a plus
- Proficient in CI/CD pipelines for data platforms
- Practical experience with Data Governance tools and/or Data Catalogs such as Datahub, OpenMetadata, Alation, etc.
- Working knowledge of Data Mesh and/or Domain-Driven Design (DDD)
- Exposure to tagging, ingesting and modeling of Google Analytics data
- Exposure to Backstage
Non-technical skills
- Communicate confidently and effectively, asking probing questions, challenging the status quo, and following up with individuals across various teams and levels of hierarchy
- We place a high value on collaboration and respect in our team, therefore some vital attributes include the ability to work together, being open to new ideas, dealing with different opinions, and above all, respecting each team member
About Paper
Paper offers an exciting, dynamic, inclusive work environment putting excellence at the center of everything we do. Our mission is woven into the fabric of our culture, challenging our team to build meaningful and creative solutions.
We thrive when we collaborate with each other, and use integrity and selflessness to align our business decisions with our mission. We approach every challenge with positivity, achieving the outcome we want regardless of what gets in the way. Our tenacity propels our hyper-growth, where trust is key and we all strive to make an impact every day.
We believe that diverse teams build better products. Paper does not and will not discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, gender, gender orientation, gender expression, age, national origin, disability, marital status, sexual orientation, or military status in any of its activities or operations.
Nobody checks every box, but the Paper team is built by passionate and innovative people who share our mission for democratizing education. If you don’t think you meet all of the requirements above but are still interested in the job, please apply.
PS. Equity is our mission! We make sure to treat all candidates equally: If you are interested please apply through our job board - our amazing talent team will reach out! Our team isn't able to pass on any calls/ emails our way - and this makes sure that the candidate experience is smooth and fair to everyone.
