Upbeat Software Engineer

Upbeat is an education-focused company that partners with K-12 districts to enhance teacher engagement and retention through research-backed surveys. They are seeking a Junior Software Engineer to join their engineering team, responsible for writing production code, supporting AWS infrastructure, and assisting with compliance audits.

Responsibilities:

• Develop and maintain features across our Angular and React web applications and Node.js (TypeScript) and Python Lambda backends, including our engagement survey platform, reports application, and internal admin portals
• Operate and improve our AWS infrastructure (Lambda, API Gateway, S3, CloudFront, CloudFormation, CodePipeline, IAM, RDS/Aurora) under the supervision of the CTO
• Drive day-to-day audit preparation work in SecureFrame: pulling evidence, attaching artifacts to SOC 2 Type II and NIST CSF 2.0 controls, reconciling failing tests, and maintaining the localized framework requirements documentation
• Triage and resolve bugs and ad-hoc technical requests escalated from across the Upbeat team — survey administrators, program managers, coaches, and operations — typically through Jira and Slack
• Pair with the CTO on cross-cutting initiatives: incident response, security findings remediation, vendor risk reviews, dependency upgrades, and infrastructure refactors
• Contribute to internal documentation, runbooks, and engineering conventions so that institutional knowledge is captured rather than locked in any individual's head
• Participate in code review and the broader engineering ceremonies (standups, planning, retrospectives)
• Help maintain and improve our AI-assisted development workflows responsibly — using tools like Claude and Copilot to accelerate work without sacrificing code quality or understanding

Requirements:

• At least 2–4 years of hands-on professional software engineering experience writing and shipping production code (this is not a role for candidates whose primary experience is prompting AI tools — we are looking for engineers who can read, write, and reason about code themselves)
• Working familiarity with at least one mainstream backend runtime (Node or Python preferred) and one modern frontend framework (Angular, React, or Vue)
• Practical AWS experience: comfortable navigating the console and CLI, deploying and debugging Lambda functions, reading CloudWatch logs, working with IAM policies, and reasoning about service interactions
• Strong written and verbal communication — much of this role is asynchronous troubleshooting via Slack, Jira tickets, and pull request review
• Demonstrated comfort with ambiguity, flexibility, and resilience; ability to context-switch between feature work, infra, audit prep, and team support without dropping balls
• Experience with or genuine interest in compliance frameworks (SOC 2, NIST CSF, ISO 27001) and the day-to-day discipline of maintaining audit evidence
• Tech savvy and fluent in the tooling required for a remote work environment, including Zoom, Google Workspace, Jira, Confluence, GitHub, and Slack
• Interested in MCP servers and other emerging developer-AI integrations as part of daily work
• Bachelor's degree in computer science, a related field, any of the liberal arts, or equivalent professional experience
• Prior experience at a small SaaS or edtech company (requested but not required)
• Prior experience supporting a SOC 2 audit cycle (requested but not required)
• Prior experience as a coach, instructor, or leader in a formal or informal educational context (requested but not required)