Senior Software Engineer

Informed K12•Remote - United States,

9d•Remote

About The Position

At Informed K12, we believe that operational excellence in school districts is one of the highest-leverage investments in public education. Our technology builds capacity for administrators and gives time and resources back to teachers by fixing one of the most overlooked problems in education: the slow, fragmented processes and workflows that carry a district's most critical work. We have been expanding our impact since 2012, building the product depth, customer relationships, and operational track record required for this work. For engineering, this is a build phase: we are invested in growing the team and giving senior engineers room to define how AI changes the way software gets built here. Much of K-12 software grows by acquisition and cost-cutting. We grow by deeply understanding district pain and building for the future of K12 operations. This role really focuses on software engineering as the discipline of learning by building, with real customers, with real data, without forcing premature abstractions back into the core platform. Informed K12 builds operational software for U.S. school districts. You will be a part of a small group that builds new product hypotheses alongside our most adventurous customers, validates them with real data, and decides what graduates into the broader platform. You will be a senior IC at the heart of that team. If you have shipped prototypes alongside customers under real ambiguity, retired your own projects on purpose, and have a clear understanding of what it means to use code to learn but carefully consider the cost of maintenance over time, then you are a great fit for this role. Our engineering challenges aren't about scale. They're about domain depth and distilling complexity into elegant primitives that model how districts actually work. School districts are among the most process-dense institutions in the country: every workflow encodes board policy, bargaining agreements, and state law, and every district encodes them differently. The hard problem is finding the primitives underneath 100 apparently-unique processes — deciding what's essential variance and what's cruft and unnecessary complexity, without breaking workflows where a mistake means someone doesn't get paid. If you find that kind of complexity more interesting than another distributed-systems problem, you'll like it here.

Requirements

10+ years of engineering experience including significant time spent embedded with customers — solutions engineering, forward-deployed engineering, founding-engineer-at-an-enterprise-startup, or equivalent
Has converted at least one demo into recurring revenue and can tell the story of which customer behavior changed your hypothesis
Has retired your own prototypes on purpose, when the learning was complete, before sunk cost set in
Comfortable shipping throwaway code to learn — and disciplined about not pulling it into core systems prematurely
Has used Cursor, Claude Code, Codex, or equivalent in real production work and can articulate where you let the model lead and where you stop and rewrite
Strong written and verbal communication — you will write decision memos that we read, and you will lead customer conversations without just telling customers what they want to hear
Holds substantive opinions on software design and forward-deployed practice

Nice To Haves

You have a substantive opinion on why "forward-deployed engineering" is having a moment, and where the trend is over-hyped
You have prior K-12, public-sector, or regulated-industry experience — or a story about what you would learn fast in a regulated context
You have a point of view on the future of AI-assisted enterprise software that goes beyond the obvious

Responsibilities

Customer-embedded prototyping with 3-5 forward-looking school districts, building product hypotheses with real data
The judgment call about what graduates — which prototypes earn their way into the core platform, which stay sandboxed, which get sunset
A working partnership with our Senior Director of Product Management and Director of Customer Success - you are a peer. We expect you to understand the work and pain of our districts as deeply as they do.
Prototypes that produce real revenue opportunities, not just demos
A small set of high-stakes new product directions we will share with you under NDA
2-3 customer-validated prototypes built alongside named district partners
A working operating model for our forward-deployed practice — how we select customers, how we measure learning, how we decide what graduates