Senior Software Engineer, Platform

Who is Recruiting from Scratch:

Recruiting from Scratch is a premier talent firm that focuses on placing the best product managers, software, and hardware talent at innovative companies. Our team is 100% remote and we work with teams across the United States to help them hire.

Senior Software Engineer, Platform

Location: USA — Remote, with preference for New York, NY or Boston, MA

Company Stage of Funding: Series A

Office Type: Fully Remote — USA

Salary: $150,000 – $200,000 + Competitive Equity

Equity: Competitive Equity

Visa: No visa sponsorship or transfers — U.S. Citizens / Green Card holders only

Travel: No significant travel required

Company Description

Our client is an education technology company building an AI-powered platform designed to transform how schools create schedules for teachers and students.

For decades, school master scheduling has been a largely manual process that consumes significant amounts of educators' time while often producing sub-optimal outcomes for students. The company combines AI-powered schedule optimization technology with expert support from experienced school schedulers to make the process more efficient, transparent, and effective.

The platform enables school and district leaders to create optimized master schedules based on student, academic, educator, and resource priorities. It also helps schools better support special-needs students and English language learners, unlock staff capacity, and create more innovative curriculum pathways.

Founded in 2023, the company has grown from working with just two pilot districts to serving approximately half a million students across 20+ states. The company has demonstrated strong product-market fit, customer growth, and renewal rates, with customers now entering their third and fourth years.

The company completed its Series A funding round in August 2025 and is now entering an important stage of growth as it scales its technology, customer base, and engineering organization.

The company has approximately 60 employees, with a distributed engineering organization operating across multiple time zones.

The culture is deeply influenced by education, with approximately 80% of employees coming from educator backgrounds. The engineering organization is lean, collaborative, curious, and highly focused on learning, mentorship, and building reliable technology that creates meaningful impact.

This is an opportunity to join the platform engineering function at an exciting stage of growth and have significant influence over cloud infrastructure, developer productivity, reliability, security, CI/CD, testing infrastructure, and engineering practices.

The role is ideal for a platform-focused engineer who enjoys solving problems for other engineers, improving development velocity, building reliable infrastructure, and taking ownership of technically complex projects.

What You Will Do

Identify, prioritize, design, and deliver technical platform solutions across cloud infrastructure, test infrastructure, shared product libraries, security practices, authentication, and CI/CD tooling

Build and maintain reliable cloud infrastructure supporting production applications

Design and improve AWS infrastructure and cloud architecture

Develop and maintain infrastructure-as-code using Terraform

Improve engineering productivity by identifying and eliminating technical and infrastructure bottlenecks

Build tooling and platform capabilities that allow engineers to ship software faster and more reliably

Take ownership of production availability and system reliability

Implement observability, monitoring, alerting, and recovery practices across production systems

Participate in periodic on-call responsibilities and production incident response

Improve deployment processes and CI/CD pipelines

Build and maintain GitHub Actions workflows and other developer tooling

Develop and maintain test infrastructure and automated testing systems

Improve engineering quality through testing, automation, and development best practices

Work with engineering stakeholders to understand technical pain points and identify opportunities for platform improvements

Drive investigation and decision-making around technology choices that impact how the engineering organization builds and maintains software

Lead critical platform projects from initial scoping through production deployment

Define project scope, break work into actionable tickets, and manage technical delivery timelines

Build shared libraries and reusable engineering infrastructure where appropriate

Improve authentication and security practices across engineering systems

Help establish scalable engineering patterns as the company grows

Monitor and improve system performance, reliability, and availability

Troubleshoot complex production and infrastructure issues

Work closely with application engineers to improve the developer experience

Uplevel the engineering team on platform technologies and best practices

Create technical documentation and internal guides

Lead technical presentations, design reviews, and code reviews

Mentor junior and less experienced engineers

Help establish engineering standards around infrastructure, testing, security, and deployment

Design and develop full-stack solutions when necessary to solve engineering or business problems

Contribute frontend code when required to deliver complete platform solutions

Work across backend, infrastructure, testing, and application layers when necessary

Balance speed of delivery with reliability, security, and long-term maintainability

Operate with significant autonomy in a fast-moving startup environment

Help shape the company's technical architecture and engineering practices as the organization scales

Ideal Candidate Background

Experience Requirements

3+ years of professional software engineering experience

3+ years of experience in infrastructure, platform engineering, DevOps, or a closely related engineering function

Strong experience building and maintaining production infrastructure

Experience working with cloud environments, particularly AWS

Experience working in a startup or high-growth engineering environment strongly preferred

Track record of improving engineering productivity and development velocity

Experience owning production systems and reliability

Experience working across engineering teams to identify and solve technical pain points

Experience taking technical projects from concept through production

Comfortable operating with significant autonomy

Experience working with distributed engineering teams is a plus

Experience mentoring or supporting other engineers is preferred

Experience in EdTech, cybersecurity, or security-focused environments is a plus

Must be based in the United States

Must be a U.S. Citizen or Green Card holder

No visa sponsorship or visa transfers

Technical Requirements

Strong AWS experience

Hands-on Terraform experience

Strong Python development experience

Experience with MongoDB or similar NoSQL databases

Strong understanding of CI/CD systems and deployment pipelines

Experience with GitHub Actions

Experience designing and maintaining automated testing infrastructure

Experience with Jest and/or Pytest

Strong understanding of cloud infrastructure and distributed systems

Experience with infrastructure-as-code

Experience with production observability and monitoring

Experience with incident response and system recovery

Understanding of authentication and security practices

Experience designing reliable and scalable engineering systems

Strong understanding of software development lifecycle and deployment practices

Experience building developer tooling and internal engineering platforms

Strong debugging and troubleshooting skills

Ability to work across infrastructure and application code

Experience designing APIs and backend services is a plus

Experience contributing to frontend applications when necessary is a plus

Strong software engineering fundamentals including system design, testing, debugging, and architecture

Platform & Developer Productivity Requirements

Strong understanding of platform engineering principles

Experience building tools and systems used by other engineers

Ability to identify engineering bottlenecks and create scalable solutions

Experience improving developer workflows and deployment velocity

Experience automating repetitive engineering processes

Strong understanding of CI/CD architecture

Experience improving testing processes and infrastructure

Experience establishing engineering standards and best practices

Ability to balance developer experience with security and reliability

Experience supporting multiple engineering teams or stakeholders

Ability to build reusable infrastructure rather than one-off solutions

Strong interest in making engineering organizations more productive

Reliability & Security Requirements

Experience owning production availability

Experience implementing monitoring and observability

Understanding of incident management and recovery practices

Experience troubleshooting production incidents

Comfortable participating in an on-call rotation

Experience implementing automated recovery or operational safeguards

Understanding of cloud security best practices

Experience with authentication and authorization systems

Strong awareness of production security and reliability considerations

Ability to identify and mitigate infrastructure risks

Soft Skills

Extremely high ownership and accountability

Strong problem-solving ability

Highly proactive and self-directed

Comfortable operating without extensive structure

Strong first-principles thinking

Excellent written and verbal communication

Strong documentation skills

Comfortable explaining technical concepts to engineers with different levels of experience

Collaborative and low-ego working style

Curious and motivated to continuously learn

Strong attention to detail

Comfortable with ambiguity

Able to prioritize competing technical needs

Comfortable working in a fast-moving startup environment

Strong mentoring mindset

Willing to take ownership of difficult production problems

Motivated by improving the effectiveness of an entire engineering organization

Comfortable working across multiple technical domains

Compensation & Benefits

Base salary: $150,000 – $200,000

Competitive equity

Flexible cash vs. equity compensation structure

Fully remote work within the United States

Preference for candidates based in New York or Boston

Health insurance

Dental insurance

Vision insurance

Life insurance

Unlimited PTO

Professional development opportunities

Free access to online learning programs

Opportunity to work on technology serving approximately half a million students

Significant ownership over platform architecture and engineering infrastructure

Opportunity to improve engineering productivity across the organization

Opportunity to work directly with engineering leadership

Exposure to AWS, Terraform, CI/CD, cloud infrastructure, security, testing, and developer tooling

Opportunity to mentor and uplevel other engineers

High-impact role at a growing Series A company

Why Join

This is an opportunity to join a rapidly growing education technology company at a pivotal stage of its development.

The company has grown from just two pilot districts to serving approximately half a million students across 20+ states, demonstrating strong product-market fit and significant customer value.

As a Senior Software Engineer, Platform, you’ll have an opportunity to work on the systems that enable the entire engineering organization to build, test, deploy, and operate software more effectively.

You’ll have significant ownership across AWS, Terraform, CI/CD, observability, reliability, security, testing infrastructure, developer tooling, and shared engineering systems.

The role is broader than traditional infrastructure engineering. You’ll work closely with application engineers, understand their pain points, and build platform solutions that directly improve engineering velocity and product quality.

You’ll also have the opportunity to mentor engineers, influence technical decisions, establish engineering best practices, and help shape the platform architecture as the company scales.

The company offers a highly collaborative and caring culture rooted in education, with approximately 80% of employees coming from educator backgrounds. The engineering team is distributed, curious, and focused on finding the right technical solutions rather than simply following convention.

If you enjoy platform engineering, developer productivity, cloud infrastructure, reliability, automation, and solving technical problems that have an impact across an entire engineering organization, this role offers significant ownership and scope.