At Earnest, we believe in a world where paying for your education takes less time than earning your degree. Join us on our mission to empower anyone seeking higher education to reduce the total price tag of their degree, supercharge their ability to pay down student debt, and get on the right financial track fast.
A little background on Earnest: We're a remote first FinTech company with an accomplished team who believe consumer lending can be radically improved and are doing something about it. We are disrupting the trillion dollar student loan industry by redefining what it means to be creditworthy. We created a company that combines data science, streamlined design, and technology to:
- Build products that simplify the lending process
- Personalize loans to suit the needs of our customers
- Engage with our customers through more human experiences
What makes an “Earnie” culture:
Earnest’s culture is as dynamic as the products we’re building and defining every day. We’re a fast-growing company, and that means we’re constantly integrating the new perspectives of every individual.
Earnies define our culture as:
- Earn Happy Clients
- Client happiness is our true north star.
- Make it happen
- We work hard to deliver high-impact results at rapid pace.
- Growth Mindset
- We love challenges, enjoy rigorous effort, and learn from our mistakes as we continuously improve.
- Do great things together
- Success is built on relationships.
- Insist on high standards
- We have relentlessly high standards and continuously raise the bar on the quality of everything: our products, services, processes, and people.
Our Earnie's are fun, innovative, and willing to rollup their sleeves to help their team succeed in a fast-paced environment. If this sounds like you, and you want to join us on our mission to radically disrupt a trillion dollar fintech industry, keep reading to find out how.
At Going Merry, we work in 2-week sprints, mostly using an agile framework. We are looking for a Project Manager to help out with QA (checking that features are built to spec) and with sprint management (ensuring that everyone is updating their Jira tickets, pointing out stalled conversations or blockages).
After the engineers complete development work on a new feature/product, they first deploy to Staging, go through a round (or multiple rounds) of QA, before the Product Manager gives final approval, and the product/feature goes to Production (live for all users to see). The QA Ops person should then also do a cursory check of all major functionality (in Prod) to ensure that nothing important has broken.
Scholarships Operations Context:
A part of of our business is a detailed Scholarships Database, which we regularly add to. There are two kinds of scholarships we might add:
- External scholarships - For this type, the scholarship application lives elsewhere (on another website, or even as a PDF you mail in), so we just list the opportunity and how/where to apply (e.g. the link)
- Hosted scholarships - We help Scholarship Providers (the foundation, school, or company hosting the scholarship and paying out the award money) host their application on Going Merry. This means in addition to the opportunity listing, we also need to create an application form for students AND support the Providers with any questions they might have.
This role will be responsible for adding both types of scholarships and for liaising with Providers who need help managing their scholarships. In addition, this role will be responsible for editing any scholarships, if students/counselors point out errors (e.g. the deadline is incorrect, or the scholarship is no longer offered this year).
Customer Service Context
We provide customer service for all types of users (providers, counselors, or students), and our customer service includes two major areas:
- Help articles - We have a database of articles that answer frequently asked questions and provide context on how Going Merry works.
- Direct chat - We interact with users via direct chat to answer their questions or to resolve any issues they may have.
This role will be responsible for making sure our database of help articles stays up to date, by editing existing articles or adding new ones. Additionally, this role will be responsible for monitoring our direct chat center, responding to messages from users, and communicating any issues that users point out to the product or engineering team.
Responsibilities:
- QA In Staging: Check each feature/product is exactly as specified, in the design doc or Jira ticket, and does not break other things on the site. Work with developers to address any inconsistencies or breaks, and then once it has fully passed QA, advance it for “UAT” with the PM.
- QA immediately after release, in Production: After each deployment, work off a checklist, to ensure that all basic functionality still works (and the deployment has not “broken” anything).
- Escalate bugs from CS: Monitor Customer Service channels for any potential bugs/issues, raise them to engineers and the PM, and then after a bug fix has been deployed, ensure that the issue has truly been resolved.
- Weekly Jira checks: Ensure that developers update all their tickets every Thursday (with any progress made, any blockages, and points remaining). Remind them if necessary. Facilitate conversations where you see blockages (e.g. someone asked a question and nobody responded, so no work progressed). At the end of the sprint, run a “Sprint Recap” for the whole team.
- Add external scholarships: Add external scholarships that members of the team, counselors, or students suggest.
- Manage hosted scholarships programs: Add hosted scholarships and liaise with the Providers to ensure they understand how the platform works and have everything they need.
- Keep scholarships DB up to date: Check user-submitted error reports for any incorrect scholarship information and make the necessary edits. Ensure that the scholarships going out in the weekly digest are high quality and accurate.
- Ad hoc scholarship-related projects: You may be asked to help out with once-off research or administrative projects once in a while, for example tagging scholarships with themes, or remapping eligibility requirements.
Experiences you will bring with you:
- High attention to detail - Need to catch every minor deviation from the spec (stray comma? Wrong color grey?)
- Excellent communication skills - This is particularly important for a fully-remote team, where your QA notes will need to stand on their own.
- Understanding of the dev process, including familiarity with Jira or other sprint management software
Earnest believes in enabling our employees to live their best lives. We offer a variety of perks and competitive benefits that include:
- Health, Dental, & Vision benefits plus savings plans
- Work anywhere in the U.S.
- Mac computers + work from home stipend to set up your home office
- Monthly internet and phone reimbursement
- Employee Stock Purchase Plan
- 401(k) plan to help you save for retirement plus a company match
- Robust tuition reimbursement program
- $1,000 travel perk on each Earnie-versary to anywhere in the world
- Competitive days of annual PTO
- Annual “my day”
- Pet insurance!
- Competitive parental leave
- Plenty of Earnest swag, optional in person team gatherings, picnics, celebrations, and plenty of fun virtual events
At Earnest, we are committed to building an environment where our employees feel included, valued, and heard. Our belief is that a strong commitment to diversity, inclusion, equity, and belonging enables us to move forward with our mission. We are dedicated to adding new perspectives to the team and encourage anyone to apply if your experience is close to what we are looking for.
Earnest provides equal employment opportunities (EEO) to all employees and applicants for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, national origin, age, disability or genetics. Qualified applicants with criminal histories will be considered for the position in a manner consistent with the Fair Chance Ordinance.
#LI-AG1
Top Skills
What We Do
Earnest was founded in 2013 on the premise that getting a loan shouldn’t be so difficult for financially responsible people. We are bringing back the trust that was previously lost in financial systems. We look beyond a simple credit score, instead analyzing a person's full education, employment, and financial profile to reward financially...