Principal Software Engineer

Rockstar

87d • $150,000 - $175,000

About The Position

Rockstar is recruiting for a mission-driven nonprofit organization that empowers educators to build classrooms that respond to every student’s needs. Founded by two award-winning teachers, this organization leads a movement of educators in implementing a self-paced, mastery-based instructional model that leverages technology to foster human connection, authentic learning, and social-emotional growth. To date, the organization has reached over 70,000+ teachers through a free online course and 20,000+ teachers through a Virtual Mentorship Program from over 200 school, district, and state partners. The team is ambitious and idealistic, led by former classroom teachers, and is passionate about its work. For the past seven years, the organization has empowered educators to use technology more effectively. Rather than creating proprietary tech tools, the focus has been on helping teachers make better use of the tools they already have. Over time, the limitations of existing tools have become apparent, leading to the development of ideas for easy-to-use tech products that will help teachers implement self-paced, mastery-based instruction in their own classrooms. Funding has now been secured to build out a team to develop these tools. An experienced, hands-on Principal Software Engineer is needed to transform the product vision into reality. This individual will be a foundational member of the new technical team, taking the lead on front-end and full stack web application development and creating intuitive, powerful tools that will directly support educators and students every day. In developing tech tools that solve the problems teachers face daily, there is an opportunity to make these teachers more effective, while making the evidence-based model more accessible to any educator who wants to help all of their students succeed. This role is critical to making that happen.

Requirements

• Strong full-stack development skills and proficiency in deploying software, SaaS tooling and infrastructure (Cloudflare, GitHub Actions, Google Cloud, Firebase, PostHog, Railway, Temporal, Vercel).
• Experience building tech products that effectively leverage AI.
• Experience integrating with education LMS and identity providers (Canvas, Clever, Google Classroom, Schoology, Moodle).
• Experience structuring deterministic LLM responses through programmatic prompt and context engineering.
• Experience implementing edtech open standards (Common Cartridge, Learning Tools Interoperability, OneRoster).
• Experience handling sensitive and/or confidential data, particularly in an education context (COPPA, CIPA, FERPA, PPRA, SOC 2).

Nice To Haves

• Experience working in a startup-like environment.
• Comfortable wearing multiple hats, communicating and collaborating with non-technical stakeholders.
• Independently balancing and managing their own work while assuming a high degree of autonomy and personal responsibility.

Responsibilities

• Build new customer-facing products and features for a suite of educational technology tools.
• Develop robust, scalable, and elegant front-end and back-end systems, with a primary focus on TypeScript and modern web frameworks (Angular, Vue.js).
• Collaborate with the Head of Engineering and Chief Innovation Officer to translate user needs and product requirements into technical solutions.
• Adapt, integrate, and migrate legacy codebases into a modern unified education platform.
• Write clean, high-quality, and elegant code, adopting, establishing, and championing best practices for the engineering team.
• Contribute to the team's software and architecture, including application and infrastructure development, and deployment of core software platforms and tools.

Benefits

• Salaried Position: $150,000-$175,000 per year
• Employer-sponsored health insurance through CareFirst BlueCross BlueShield
• Participation in Vanguard 403(b) deferred-compensation plan with 3% employer match
• Paid Time Off, inclusive of: vacation/PTO (20 days), paid holidays, paid parental leave, sick and safe paid time off, 'Me Days', and the ability to earn paid Comp time off
• Annual budget for organization-funded Continuous Learning for the program(s) requested (available after 6 months of continuous full-time employment)
• FSA and Dependent Care FSA access
• 1x Salary Life Insurance company-paid coverage
• Access to Wishbone Pet Insurance Benefit
• Ability to work remotely and to set own hours (within reason)

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior
• Education Level: Bachelor's degree
• Number of Employees: 1-10 employees