Staff Software Engineer, Backend - Growth

Our Mission and Opportunity

Early education is one of the greatest determinants of childhood outcomes, is a must for working families, and has a lasting social and economic impact. Brightwheel’s vision is to enable high quality early education for every child — by giving teachers meaningfully more time with students each day, engaging parents in the development of their kids, and supporting the small businesses that make up the backbone of the $175 billion early education market. Brightwheel is the most loved technology brand in early education globally, trusted by thousands of educators and millions of families.

Our Team

We are a fully remote team with employees across every time zone in the US. Our team is passionate, talented, and customer-focused. Our exceptional investor group includes Addition, Bessemer Venture Partners, Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, GGV Capital, Lowercase Capital, Emerson Collective, and Mark Cuban. 

We believe that everyone—from our employees to the students, teachers, and administrators we serve— should be given the opportunity to learn and thrive, whatever their background may be. We celebrate diversity in all forms because it allows our team and the communities we serve to reach their full potential and do their best work. From decision making, to how we operate, we ground ourselves in our Leadership Principles every day. 

Who you are

We are seeking a staff software engineer who is well-rounded technically and passionate about the positive impact their code can make in people’s lives. Our School Operations team is focused on enabling the best day-to-day product experience possible. Early childhood educators are terribly short on time: the easier it is for them to take care of routine tasks, like tracking student attendance, logging activities, and communicating with parents, the more time they have to focus on engaging directly with the children they care for. At brightwheel, product engineers work closely with product and design, as well as with other areas of the business, to define and deliver an experience that meets our customers' biggest needs.

Every engineer at brightwheel is afforded a high degree of ownership and autonomy. We are a lean, fast-moving team and value individuals who can optimize for being impactful while considering both technical and business drivers. You’ll bring a high degree of ownership and ability to execute.

What you’ll do

• Lead projects on our School Operations team - helping ensure brightwheel works exceptionally well for our customers.
• Work alongside product and design to scope and implement new features or product lines
• Provide input to both delivery and discovery–providing new ideas, proposals, and constructive criticism to the team
• Be a steward of quality, scalability, security, and performance. You'll work with other engineers to ensure that we have a solid foundation that serves our customers and enables the team to continue building a great product
• Design and architect new software systems or introduce new technologies, as appropriate, to support brightwheel's growth
• Share knowledge and expertise across the engineering team.
• Mentor and help to grow the engineering team

Qualifications, Skills, & Abilities:

• 5+ years of professional experience, preferably in fast-paced early- or mid-stage startups
• Proficiency in both contributing to and designing APIs using Ruby on Rails or similar technologies
• Expertise in writing automated tests (unit/integration/functional)
• Expertise in using Git (or VC equivalent)
• Experience with 3rd party integrations
• Experience with variation testing
• Experience with a variety of codebase sizes and ages
• Proficiency with AWS or other cloud platforms
• Experience with architecting distributed systems for scalability and reliability
• Strong verbal and written communication skills for both technical and non-technical audiences
• Experience with microservice or service-oriented architectures preferred
• Experience with modern webapps like React.js preferred
• Experience with Infrastructure as Code (IaC) preferred




Candidates with varying backgrounds are encouraged to apply. We do not require prior knowledge of technologies in our stack; we only need a desire to learn them. At brightwheel, you will encounter:

• Ruby on Rails
• PostgreSQL
• Redis
• React.js
• CircleCI
• GitHub Actions
• Kubernetes
• AWS-managed services, like Redshift and ECS

Brightwheel is committed to creating a diverse and inclusive work environment and is an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, gender, gender identity, gender expression, sexual orientation, national origin, genetics, disability, age, or veteran status.