Software Architect
About The Position
Harris Digital Learning helps school districts build and run successful digital learning programs. At the heart of our work is eSchoolware™, our proprietary learning management system. It brings together everything districts need to manage, deliver, and support online and hybrid learning in a single platform. eSchoolware serves students, teachers, parents, and administrators alike. It offers age-appropriate learning experiences for middle and high school students, mastery-based course progression, tools for communication and collaboration, and a reporting system with more than 200 standard reports, so educators always have the data they need to support student success. Our mission is simple: empower educators and engage every learner at every stage of their education.
Requirements
- 8+ years building enterprise software, including 5+ leading engineering teams or owning architecture on significant programs
- Have modernized a large legacy system — decomposed a monolith, replaced a data layer, migrated a platform off an unsupported stack.
- Strong Java and Spring Boot, and genuine comfort in a modern front-end stack. We are targeting Angular, React, and TypeScript.
- Relational database depth — schema design, ORM behaviour, query performance. Oracle and PostgreSQL are both in play.
- Experience owning a vendor or systems-integrator relationship: writing the specification, defining acceptance, and holding the line when delivery drifts.
- Cloud-native delivery on Azure or equivalent — CI/CD, infrastructure as code, monitoring and observability.
- Building to WCAG 2.2 AA. Accessibility is a contractual obligation passed to us by the districts we serve, not a nice-to-have.
- Experience working with Linux servers
- Bachelor’s degree in software engineering, computer science or a related field, or the equivalent in demonstrated experience.
Nice To Haves
- K–12 or higher-education technology, and the 1EdTech standards — LTI 1.3, Common Cartridge and Thin Common Cartridge, OneRoster, QTI
- Oracle-to-PostgreSQL migration, ora2pg, cutover planning and rollback strategy
- Establishing test coverage on systems that have none
- Remediating security findings in legacy code — secrets management, dependency CVEs, audit logging
- Student data privacy: FERPA, COPPA, and district data-protection agreements
- Portal frameworks such as Liferay. We are migrating away from it, so we are interested in the experience rather than a plan to keep it.
- Gamified learning experiences and engagement mechanics
- Fluent use of AI-assisted development tools in real delivery work, not just experimentation
Responsibilities
- Define the target architecture and the sequence to reach it.
- Specify and accept our modernization partner’s deliverables against defined criteria.
- Lead the data-layer modernization: retire the XDoclet-generated Hibernate mappings in favour of JPA, and oversee the Oracle to PostgreSQL conversion alongside a specialist contractor.
- Stand up the REST API façade and the identity, organization and enrollment foundation that everything else depends on.
- Establish engineering practice from close to zero — CI/CD, code review, and characterization tests on a system with almost no test coverage today.
- Recommend the shape of the team, and help us hire it.
- Architecture standards, design patterns and technical governance
- Mentoring engineers and contractors
- Making AI-assisted development a normal part of how the team works
- Ensuring quality, maintainability, accessibility and security are built in rather than retrofitted
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What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Senior
