Staff Backend Engineer - Platform

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

Brightwheel is seeking an experienced  Staff Backend Engineer to join the platform team. You will be part of a team responsible for enabling a large number of engineering teams to operate independently and autonomously, move fast in delivering value to customers towards brightwheel’s vision, and limit the blast radius of their changes. You are comfortable taking into consideration both technical and business drivers to most efficiently deliver value. You are an excellent collaborator, and also accustomed to taking ownership and initiative as a technical leader on small teams (or even large teams). Most importantly, you are eager to have the opportunity to do all of this in a dynamic startup environment where scrappiness, flexibility, and creativity will be required every single day.

• Lead complex cross-team projects, working alongside product engineering, that increase engineering velocity, improve system reliability and security, and optimize operational costs
• Improve engineering velocity by implementing best practices and frameworks; improve coding efficiency and quality across the team
• Proactively identify and diagnose issues of reliability and performance; rapidly deploy code to address issues
• 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 cross-team to ensure we have a solid platform 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 drive brightwheel’s growth
• Drive sound, data-driven decision-making; analyze data insights to uncover opportunities to improve architecture for a great customer experience
• Promote excellence in engineering process & culture across teams
• Collaborate effectively with technical as well as non-technical functions across the company with empathy; promote technical learning across teams
• Mentor and help grow engineering teams. Build trust and respect in the team
• Interview and evaluate engineering candidate technical capabilities to help grow our engineering team

• API and application development, ideally in a variety of languages like Ruby, Python or similar languages
• Data modeling, and success optimizing relational databases (PostgreSQL, MySQL or equivalent) for large datasets
• Integrating services with various integration styles, including synchronous and asynchronous architectures
• Expert at building cloud infrastructure and services in AWS or equivalent

• Proficiency in both contributing to and designing backend systems using Ruby on Rails
• Knowledge of overall security concepts with infrastructure and web
• Common database, caching, and web technologies e.g. nginx or equivalent, PostgreSQL, Redis, etc.
• GitOps tooling for infrastructure automation e.g. Flux, ArgoCD
• CI/CD pipeline automation e.g. GitHub Actions, CircleCI, Buildkite, Jenkins or equivalent
• Infrastructure-as-code tools like AWS CloudFormation, CDK, Terraform, or Pulumi
• Containerization and orchestration tools e.g. Docker, Kubernetes, ECS, EKS

• You make pragmatic technology choices at work and make time to learn in your slack time whenever appropriate
• You care deeply about the quality of your work and are aware of how your attitude affects those around you; it’s obvious you’re having fun with your work and peers
• You strive to improve your velocity and the teams around you, with new frameworks & technologies
• You experiment with many different types of development and project methodologies and have a healthy appreciation for what works; you drive engineering process, best practices, and culture improvements
• You focus on clear and concise communication because you understand it’s the biggest responsibility of your job as an engineer
• You love to teach and learn from your peers

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.