Staff Engineer

ParentSquare

68d • $180,000 - $220,000

About The Position

Business is booming and our platform is growing at an incredible pace. As we serve more and larger school districts, we face exciting challenges in scalability, architecture, and long-term technical strategy. To meet these challenges, we need a technical leader to help guide our engineering organization into the future. We are seeking a Staff Software Engineer to act as a technical force multiplier. You will be a key influencer of our technical vision, tackling our most complex and ambiguous problems that span multiple teams and systems. You will partner with engineering leadership, product managers, and other engineers to ensure the long-term health, security, and scalability of our platform. Your role will go beyond a single feature or sprint; you will be instrumental in setting technical direction, mentoring senior engineers, and ensuring we are building the right systems in the right way. Most importantly, you’re someone who shares in our passion for improving the lives of students through communication.

Requirements

• Extensive experience designing, building, and operating large-scale, distributed systems on a cloud platform like AWS.
• Demonstrated expertise in our core technologies, including Ruby/Python, JavaScript/TypeScript, and PHP, with a deep understanding of system architecture.
• Proven track record of making significant technical contributions to the architecture and design (architecture, design patterns, reliability, scaling) of complex systems.
• Experience leading large, complex technical projects from inception to completion with minimal oversight.
• Expertise with relational databases (MySQL/Postgres) and messaging queues (SQS) at scale.
• Excellent communication skills, with the ability to articulate complex technical concepts to both technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Bachelor’s degree (or higher) in Computer Science or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
• A passion for mentoring other engineers and a proven ability to raise the technical bar for a team or organization.

Responsibilities

• Drive the architectural vision and long-term technical strategy for major components of the ParentSquare platform.
• Lead the design and implementation of solutions for our most complex, cross-functional technical challenges, ensuring solutions are scalable, secure, and maintainable.
• Mentor and level-up Senior Engineers through design reviews, code reviews, and direct technical guidance, fostering a culture of technical excellence.
• Act as a technical expert and point of escalation for critical system incidents, leading debugging efforts on our most challenging production issues.
• Author technical design documents, RFCs, and architecture diagrams to articulate and align teams on complex technical decisions.
• Identify and champion improvements to our engineering processes, standards, and tooling to increase team velocity and product quality.
• Collaborate with engineering and product leadership to influence the product and technical roadmap, anticipating future needs and challenges.

Benefits

• Employer-paid health insurance (including dependent coverage)
• An employer-matched 401K retirement savings program from day 1
• Paid Parental Leave
• Stock options
• Health + wellness reimbursements
• PTO that increases each year
• 15 paid holidays, including your birthday!

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior
• Education Level: Bachelor's degree
• Number of Employees: 51-100 employees