Staff Software Engineer

StrongMind is a remote-first education and technology company on a mission to transform learning for students, families, and educators across the country. The role of Staff Software Engineer involves leading the design and implementation of scalable AI-enabled products and systems, ensuring high-quality engineering practices while collaborating with cross-functional teams.

Responsibilities:

• Lead design reviews and implementation for larger, cross-cutting efforts; set technical direction within a scope
• Establish reusable patterns—service templates, libraries, guardrails, and default configurations—that multiple teams adopt
• Drive refactors and reliability improvements that measurably reduce recurring defects and incident volume
• Introduce data contracts, validation gates, and coordinated migrations that align shared entities and ownership
• Improve performance practices by introducing dashboards, benchmarks, and post-incident systemic fixes; coach others on effective use of AI-assisted tools
• Introduce security and privacy guardrails (secure templates, CI checks, safer defaults) that reduce recurring findings across the team
• Lead team-level planning: establish shared expectations for breakdown, sizing, and sequencing; surface risks early and keep work flowing
• Create communication norms (design/decision docs, incident comms templates) and mentoring structures (onboarding plans, buddy systems) that scale the team
• Unblock teammates on hard technical problems and advocate for scope decisions in product terms
• This position requires availability to work core business hours of 8:00 AM to 5:00 PM Arizona time, Monday through Friday

Requirements:

• 5+ years of professional software engineering experience shipping production code
• Extensive experience designing, building, and operating production software systems at scale
• Track record of setting technical direction for a team or major system and shipping the associated outcomes
• Demonstrated ability to establish shared patterns, templates, or guardrails that other engineers adopt
• Strong system design skills—scaling patterns, reliability controls (timeouts, retries, backpressure, caching), and first-class observability
• Experience leading refactors, deprecations, or modernization efforts that reduce long-term cost of change
• Proven ability to influence engineering direction across multiple teams through writing, reviews, and coaching
• Strong cross-functional partnership skills with Product, Design, and Engineering Management
• Excellent written and verbal communication, including decision docs, design summaries, and incident follow-ups
• Alignment with StrongMind's core values: Kindness, Accountability, Collaboration, Innovation, and Grit
• Experience shaping AI-enabled or data-intensive platforms, or establishing applied AI development standards
• Deep experience with AWS or a comparable cloud and distributed systems
• Experience improving developer experience, CI/CD, or internal platform capabilities
• EdTech or mission-driven product experience
• Experience introducing privacy-by-design or secure-SDLC practices across a team