Software Architect

Informed K12•Remote - United States,

8d•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 in investment mode, 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 building, and we are hiring the people who will do it. 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. We're hiring an Architect to be the guardian of simplicity. Informed K12 has been working closely with districts for over a decade, which is long enough to learn the truth about software: the code that survives isn't the cleverest, it's the most maintainable. We think maintainability is one of the most important and most under-rated ideas in engineering. In the age of AI, anyone can ship a working feature in an afternoon; the scarce skill is keeping the system coherent as it grows. We're hiring our next Architect to be the guardian of simplicity of our core platform. You'll join at the stage where good architectural decisions compound and bad ones calcify — and you'll own the question of where engineering rigor moves when the code is increasingly written by machines, and how we guard it.

Requirements

10+ years of senior engineering experience, including significant time working with enterprise software, and ideally experience working at a platform company (not just an internal app team)
Fluency with API design, data modeling for operational systems, and the trade-off space between tight and loose coupling
Has shipped architectural migrations affecting many users without melting the customer base, and can describe the failure modes you avoided, not just the wins
Uses Cursor, Claude Code, Codex, or equivalent in real production work and can articulate what AI makes cheap and what requires heavy guidance
Has talked to enterprise customers in the room, not just through PMs, and holds substantive opinions on software design, architecture, and engineering

Nice To Haves

Has published, talks or posts, not for the credential but as evidence of reflective practice
Prior experience with regulated industries, K-12, or public-sector procurement

Responsibilities

Own the durability of our core platform data model and the discipline about when to add new structure versus leave things flexible
Own API design across an increasingly programmatic surface: partner integrations, programmatic workflow APIs, authentication for partners and AI agents
Own architectural review across core engineering, including the major migrations we expect to take on over the next 12 to 24 months
Mentor senior ICs without becoming a bottleneck
Own the patterns, tests, and tooling that make our AI-assisted engineering loop produce work we can stand behind
Talk to enterprise customers in the room, not just through PMs, including real time onsite with our districts
Bring a sharp point of view on AI, get ahead of the shift every software company is about to face, and leave your fingerprints on how we navigate it