Software Engineer, Backend

About Us

Trusted and loved by 25 million educators, students, and families worldwide, the company is the world’s leading elementary learning experience company, offering an award-winning platform and a suite of digital curriculum products for teachers to deliver joyful, accessible instruction.  Through interactive lessons, digital portfolios, and two-way communication features, the company keeps everyone in the learning loop by providing continuous visibility into the student's learning experience to support and celebrate their learning.

Our Mission

The company’s mission is to provide every elementary student with joyful and connected learning experiences that lay the foundation for success in life.

Your Team

The company provides a unique opportunity to impact the lives and learning of millions of students, educators, and parents in the US and across the world. The Core Systems team sits at the heart of the technology that powers the millions of interactions with our product every day, ensuring that the platform is reliable, available, performs well, and contributes meaningfully to learning in the classroom. The team is small and covers a broad surface area, so for high-performing and independent developers there is a vast potential for ownership and upward mobility by demonstrating high impact with their efforts. We value impact over effort, and work hard to preserve real work-life balance through our team culture and the company’s unique benefits.

Your Role

A Senior Engineer on the Core Systems team is expected to have a deep understanding of backend development and infrastructure at scale. This means expertise with the implementation of HTTP APIs, interaction of API code with data storage layers, infrastructure provisioning, and a thorough grasp on how software goes from being built by dozens of developers, tested, shipped, and run at scale with rock-solid reliability.

Your Responsibilities

• Modify, diagnose, and change code in our Python HTTP backend, which runs on Tornado and backed by data stored in Dynamo, Elasticsearch, and Redis.

• Contribute to our infrastructure-as-code repo, which is responsible for provisioning resources in AWS.

• Reason about distributed systems to drive good technical decision-making.

• Own technical work from the early stages of inception, to implementation, to production monitoring and alerting.

• Export best practices around code authoring, tool usage, and observability to other engineering teams at the company.

• Ensure the security and reliability of the company's platform, proactively identifying and addressing potential vulnerabilities and performance bottlenecks.

• Optimize cloud infrastructure for cost-effectiveness, leveraging best practices in resource management

• Help develop a strong technical roadmap and engineering culture through design proposals, industry engagement, and more

• Partner with senior team members, product managers, and other key stakeholders to drive strategic initiatives and align infrastructure development with business objectives.

Your Requirements

• 7+ years experience with backend development - durable systems-level thinking will always trump specific language experience.

• Thorough understanding of the mechanics of distributed systems - things like eventual consistency, fan-in fan-out patterns, backpressure, etc.

• Familiarity with AWS core services (EC2, Lambda, DynamoDB, S3, ECS/EKS) or similar cloud experience

• Proficient with CI/CD pipelines, preferably Github Actions

• Self-starter with an ability to execute independently, knowing when to stop and seek more information and when to forge ahead and boldly own your vision.

• Proven experience owning and operating the infrastructure that runs software at a high scale (think billions of incoming requests per month)

Compensation & Benefits

Our salary ranges are based on paying competitively for our size and industry. Salary is just one part of our total compensation package that includes perks & benefits, and development opportunities at the company. Individual pay decisions are based on several factors, including qualifications for the role, experience level, skillset, geography, and balancing internal equity relative to other Seesawers. It is our expectation that the majority of candidates who are offered roles at the company will land well within our salary ranges based on these factors.

The annual hiring base salary for this position is: $172,500 - $200,000

This is an Exempt position.

Benefits include: Medical/Dental + Orthodontics/Vision Coverage, 401(k) Match, Flexible Paid Time Off, Mindfulness First Fridays, Monthly Technology Stipend, Home Office Setup Stipend, Professional Development Stipend, Paid Parental Leave, Charitable Donation Matching, Volunteer Days.

Use of AI in Our Interview Process

We welcome candidates to use AI tools to research, prepare and practice before an interview. During interviews and live assessments, however, candidates are expected to respond based on their own knowledge and experience and without the use of AI tools. Unless we explicitly authorize AI use for a specific interview or exercise, the use of AI tools during an interview is not permitted. Unauthorized use of AI during an interview may result in disqualification from the hiring process.

Candidate Identity Verification

As part of our hiring process, the company will take reasonable steps to verify a candidate’s identity and confirm that the individual participating in the interview process is the individual who submitted the application. Depending on the role and stage of the process, verification may be completed virtually or in person, by the company directly or through a third-party verification service. Candidates will receive instructions about the process as applicable.  This verification is separate from any employment eligibility verification that may be required after hire.”

The company cares about building a diverse and inclusive team to better advocate for the needs of our incredibly diverse K-12 users.

We prioritize work-life balance and actually walk the walk — we care a lot about our work, but care more about our employee's well-being. We encourage everyone to work at a sustainable pace and have a flexible vacation policy that people actually use.

The company provides equal employment opportunities (EEO) to all employees and applicants for employment without regard to race, religious creed, color, sex, sex stereotype, gender, gender identity/gender expression/transgender, national origin, ancestry, physical or mental disability, medical condition, genetic information/characteristics, marital status/registered domestic partner status, age, sexual orientation, or military or veteran status. In addition to federal law requirements, the company complies with applicable state and local laws governing nondiscrimination in employment in every location in which the company has facilities. This policy applies to all terms and conditions of employment, including recruiting, hiring, placement, promotion, termination, layoff, recall, transfer, leaves of absence, compensation, and training.

The company is committed to protecting your personal data. Learn more about the personal information we collect, how we use it, and how to exercise your rights here: U.S. Privacy Notice.

Our company participates in E-Verify.