Senior Software Engineer

Modern Classrooms Project•Washington, DC

1d•$159,998 - $190,000•Remote

About The Position

The Modern Classrooms Project (MCP) is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization that empowers educators to build classrooms that respond to every student’s needs. Founded by two award-winning teachers, we lead 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, we have reached over 100,000+ teachers through our free online course in 150+ countries. We are an ambitious, idealistic team led by former classroom teachers, and we are passionate about what we do. For the past eight years, we have empowered educators to use technology more effectively. Last year, we secured funding to begin developing our own edtech software products. We need an experienced, hands-on, AI-native Senior Software Engineer to help transform our product vision into reality. You will be a foundational member of our new technical team, taking the lead on back-end and generative AI content pipelines, and creating intuitive, powerful tools that will directly support educators and students every day.

Requirements

AI-native. Expert in continuous multi-session development with Claude Code and/or OpenAI Codex.
Expert at prompt engineering and context engineering.
Writes Agent Skills the way other engineers write unit tests.
Practices Spec-Driven Development (GitHub Spec Kit or equivalent) as part of your normal workflow.
Knows what a RALPH Loop is and how to deploy one.
Ships multiple large features per week by rebuilding workflow around agentic tools.
Understands the difference between vibe-coding and prompt engineering with specification-driven work.
Built real backend AI orchestration layers that run when you're not watching.
Thinks in graphs — shared state flowing through nodes, conditional edges, interrupts, and circuit breakers.
Shipped non-trivial agentic pipelines using LangGraph, Python, and TypeScript, or equivalent.
Treats durable execution, structured outputs, human-in-the-loop checkpoints, and provider-agnostic model routing as baseline design constraints.
Built evaluation harnesses, annotated datasets, and versioned prompt chains as first-class artifacts.
Self-directed. Thrives in small, high-autonomy teams and startups where the surface area is broad and the context shifts constantly.
Writes clearly.
Owns a problem end-to-end without waiting for a ticket to tell you what to do next.
Loves to learn. Actively leveraging the latest developments in AI and applying them to enhance both your own and others' work.
Motivated by MCP's mission and vision, and eager to build teacher- and student-facing products.
Motivated to be part of something larger than yourself.
Believes that the highest value of your talent is using it to empower others.
Ready to make a real difference in educators' and young people's lives.

Nice To Haves

Experience building edtech products.
Experience handling sensitive and/or confidential data, particularly in an education context (COPPA, CIPA, FERPA, PPRA, SOC 2).

Responsibilities

Ship multiple substantial features per week.
Operate as the technical lead and steward of your agentic coding pipeline. Write detailed prompts and specifications, and embrace Spec-Driven Development. Compose orchestrator agents and dispatch agent teams. Engineer RALPH Loops with well-formed completion promises. Actively multitask between several agents to simultaneously develop multiple substantial features in parallel.
Build the AI workflow engine that powers our products. Develop state-of-the-art graph-based agentic orchestration workflows with nodes and conditional edges, structured outputs, interrupts and human-in-the-loop circuit breakers. Implement durable execution, long-running work that survives process restarts, rate limits, and outages, with an evaluation harness, versioned prompt chains, annotated datasets and cross-provider benchmarks on cost, latency, and quality.
Architect resilient, high-scale backend systems. Design and scale distributed infrastructure across Python and TypeScript to support heavy edtech workloads. Own the systems design, API boundaries, and database performance, ensuring that our foundational architecture remains highly available, secure, and ready to scale.
Extend the context layer. Contribute to our AGENTS.md and Agent Skills so that every session produces better work than the last. These are living production artifacts, and you own the parts that describe your domain.
Partner on architecture. Collaborate closely with the Head of Engineering, Chief Innovation Officer, and other product leaders on technical direction, feature roadmap, and the hard technical design decisions and trade-offs underneath.
Raise the bar for the team. Review the work of teammates and contractors. Collaborate with teammates on architecture and implementation reviews. Write PR comments, design docs, and agent skills that make the next person faster.

Benefits

Salaried position: $160,000-$190,000 gross salary per year
Employer-sponsored health insurance through CareFirst BlueCross BlueShield
Employer-sponsored dental and vision insurance through MetLife
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 MCP-funded Continuous Learning for the program(s) you request (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 your own hours (within reason)