Software Engineer

About Us: Trusted and loved by 25 million educators, students, and families worldwide, Seesaw is the world’s leading elementary learning experience company, offering an award-winning platform and a suite of digital curriculum products for teachers to deliver joyful, accessible instruction. Through interactive lessons, digital portfolios, and two-way communication features, Seesaw keeps everyone in the learning loop by providing continuous visibility into the student's learning experience to support and celebrate their learning. Our Mission: Seesaw’s mission is to provide every elementary student with joyful and connected learning experiences that lay the foundation for success in life. Your Team: Seesaw provides a unique opportunity to impact the lives and learning of millions of students, educators, and parents in the US and across the world. The Core Systems team sits at the heart of the technology that powers the millions of interactions with our product every day, ensuring that the platform is reliable, available, performs well, and contributes meaningfully to learning in the classroom. The team is small and covers a broad surface area, so for high-performing and independent developers there is a vast potential for ownership and upward mobility by demonstrating high impact with their efforts. We value impact over effort, and work hard to preserve real work-life balance through our team culture and Seesaw’s unique benefits. Your Role: An IC4 engineer on the Core Systems team is expected to have a deep understanding of backend development and infrastructure at scale. This means expertise with the implementation of HTTP APIs, interaction of API code with data storage layers, infrastructure provisioning, and a thorough grasp on how software goes from being built by dozens of developers, tested, shipped, and run at scale with rock-solid reliability. Your Responsibilities: Modify, diagnose, and change code in our Python HTTP backend, which runs on Tornado and backed by data stored in Dynamo, Elasticsearch, and Redis. Contribute to our infrastructure-as-code repo, which is responsible for provisioning resources in AWS. Reason about distributed systems to drive good technical decision-making. Own technical work from the early stages of inception, to implementation, to production monitoring and alerting. Export best practices around code authoring, tool usage, and observability to other engineering teams at Seesaw. Ensure the security and reliability of Seesaw's platform, proactively identifying and addressing potential vulnerabilities and performance bottlenecks. Optimize cloud infrastructure for cost-effectiveness, leveraging best practices in resource management Help develop a strong technical roadmap and engineering culture through design proposals, industry engagement, and more Partner with senior team members, product managers, and other key stakeholders to drive strategic initiatives and align infrastructure development with business objectives. Your Requirements: 5+ years experience with backend development - durable systems-level thinking will always trump specific language experience. Thorough understanding of the mechanics of distributed systems - things like eventual consistency, fan-in fan-out patterns, backpressure, etc. Familiarity with AWS core services (EC2, Lambda, DynamoDB, S3, ECS/EKS) or similar cloud experience Proficient with CI/CD pipelines, preferably Github Actions Self-starter with an ability to execute independently, knowing when to stop and seek more information and when to forge ahead and boldly own your vision. Proven experience owning and operating the infrastructure that runs software at a high scale (think billions of incoming requests per month) Compensation Benefits: Our salary ranges are based on paying competitively for our size and industry. Salary is just one part of our total compensation package that includes equity, perks benefits, and development opportunities at ... (truncated, view full listing at source)