Senior Software Engineer, Platform

Recruiting From Scratch•San Francisco, CA

18h•Remote

About The Position

Recruiting from Scratch is a premier talent firm that focuses on placing the best product managers, software, and hardware talent at innovative companies. Our team is 100% remote and we work with teams across the United States to help them hire. Our client is an education technology company building an AI-powered platform designed to transform how schools create schedules for teachers and students. For decades, school master scheduling has been a largely manual process that consumes significant amounts of educators' time while often producing sub-optimal outcomes for students. The company combines AI-powered schedule optimization technology with expert support from experienced school schedulers to make the process more efficient, transparent, and effective. The platform enables school and district leaders to create optimized master schedules based on student, academic, educator, and resource priorities. It also helps schools better support special-needs students and English language learners, unlock staff capacity, and create more innovative curriculum pathways. Founded in 2023, the company has grown from working with just two pilot districts to serving approximately half a million students across 20+ states. The company has demonstrated strong product-market fit, customer growth, and renewal rates, with customers now entering their third and fourth years. The company completed its Series A funding round in August 2025 and is now entering an important stage of growth as it scales its technology, customer base, and engineering organization. The company has approximately 60 employees, with a distributed engineering organization operating across multiple time zones. The culture is deeply influenced by education, with approximately 80% of employees coming from educator backgrounds. The engineering organization is lean, collaborative, curious, and highly focused on learning, mentorship, and building reliable technology that creates meaningful impact. This is an opportunity to join the platform engineering function at an exciting stage of growth and have significant influence over cloud infrastructure, developer productivity, reliability, security, CI/CD, testing infrastructure, and engineering practices. The role is ideal for a platform-focused engineer who enjoys solving problems for other engineers, improving development velocity, building reliable infrastructure, and taking ownership of technically complex projects.

Requirements

3+ years of professional software engineering experience
3+ years of experience in infrastructure, platform engineering, DevOps, or a closely related engineering function
Strong experience building and maintaining production infrastructure
Experience working with cloud environments, particularly AWS
Experience working in a startup or high-growth engineering environment strongly preferred
Track record of improving engineering productivity and development velocity
Experience owning production systems and reliability
Experience working across engineering teams to identify and solve technical pain points
Experience taking technical projects from concept through production
Comfortable operating with significant autonomy
Experience working with distributed engineering teams is a plus
Experience mentoring or supporting other engineers is preferred
Experience in EdTech, cybersecurity, or security-focused environments is a plus
Must be based in the United States
Must be a U.S. Citizen or Green Card holder
No visa sponsorship or visa transfers
Strong AWS experience
Hands-on Terraform experience
Strong Python development experience
Experience with MongoDB or similar NoSQL databases
Strong understanding of CI/CD systems and deployment pipelines
Experience with GitHub Actions
Experience designing and maintaining automated testing infrastructure
Experience with Jest and/or Pytest
Strong understanding of cloud infrastructure and distributed systems
Experience with infrastructure-as-code
Experience with production observability and monitoring
Experience with incident response and system recovery
Understanding of authentication and security practices
Experience designing reliable and scalable engineering systems
Strong understanding of software development lifecycle and deployment practices
Experience building developer tooling and internal engineering platforms
Strong debugging and troubleshooting skills
Ability to work across infrastructure and application code
Experience designing APIs and backend services is a plus
Experience contributing to frontend applications when necessary is a plus
Strong software engineering fundamentals including system design, testing, debugging, and architecture
Strong understanding of platform engineering principles
Experience building tools and systems used by other engineers
Ability to identify engineering bottlenecks and create scalable solutions
Experience improving developer workflows and deployment velocity
Experience automating repetitive engineering processes
Strong understanding of CI/CD architecture
Experience improving testing processes and infrastructure
Experience establishing engineering standards and best practices
Ability to balance developer experience with security and reliability
Experience supporting multiple engineering teams or stakeholders
Ability to build reusable infrastructure rather than one-off solutions
Strong interest in making engineering organizations more productive
Experience owning production availability
Experience implementing monitoring and observability
Understanding of incident management and recovery practices
Experience troubleshooting production incidents
Comfortable participating in an on-call rotation
Experience implementing automated recovery or operational safeguards
Understanding of cloud security best practices
Experience with authentication and authorization systems
Strong awareness of production security and reliability considerations
Ability to identify and mitigate infrastructure risks
Extremely high ownership and accountability
Strong problem-solving ability
Highly proactive and self-directed
Comfortable operating without extensive structure
Strong first-principles thinking
Excellent written and verbal communication
Strong documentation skills
Comfortable explaining technical concepts to engineers with different levels of experience
Collaborative and low-ego working style
Curious and motivated to continuously learn
Strong attention to detail
Comfortable with ambiguity
Able to prioritize competing technical needs
Comfortable working in a fast-moving startup environment
Strong mentoring mindset
Willing to take ownership of difficult production problems
Motivated by improving the effectiveness of an entire engineering organization
Comfortable working across multiple technical domains

Nice To Haves

Experience working in a startup or high-growth engineering environment
Experience working with distributed engineering teams
Experience mentoring or supporting other engineers
Experience in EdTech, cybersecurity, or security-focused environments
Experience designing APIs and backend services
Experience contributing to frontend applications when necessary

Responsibilities

Identify, prioritize, design, and deliver technical platform solutions across cloud infrastructure, test infrastructure, shared product libraries, security practices, authentication, and CI/CD tooling
Build and maintain reliable cloud infrastructure supporting production applications
Design and improve AWS infrastructure and cloud architecture
Develop and maintain infrastructure-as-code using Terraform
Improve engineering productivity by identifying and eliminating technical and infrastructure bottlenecks
Build tooling and platform capabilities that allow engineers to ship software faster and more reliably
Take ownership of production availability and system reliability
Implement observability, monitoring, alerting, and recovery practices across production systems
Participate in periodic on-call responsibilities and production incident response
Improve deployment processes and CI/CD pipelines
Build and maintain GitHub Actions workflows and other developer tooling
Develop and maintain test infrastructure and automated testing systems
Improve engineering quality through testing, automation, and development best practices
Work with engineering stakeholders to understand technical pain points and identify opportunities for platform improvements
Drive investigation and decision-making around technology choices that impact how the engineering organization builds and maintains software
Lead critical platform projects from initial scoping through production deployment
Define project scope, break work into actionable tickets, and manage technical delivery timelines
Build shared libraries and reusable engineering infrastructure where appropriate
Improve authentication and security practices across engineering systems
Help establish scalable engineering patterns as the company grows
Monitor and improve system performance, reliability, and availability
Troubleshoot complex production and infrastructure issues
Work closely with application engineers to improve the developer experience
Uplevel the engineering team on platform technologies and best practices
Create technical documentation and internal guides
Lead technical presentations, design reviews, and code reviews
Mentor junior and less experienced engineers
Help establish engineering standards around infrastructure, testing, security, and deployment
Design and develop full-stack solutions when necessary to solve engineering or business problems
Contribute frontend code when required to deliver complete platform solutions
Work across backend, infrastructure, testing, and application layers when necessary
Balance speed of delivery with reliability, security, and long-term maintainability
Operate with significant autonomy in a fast-moving startup environment
Help shape the company's technical architecture and engineering practices as the organization scales