Senior Software Engineer, Platform

📋 Description

• • Own the technical heartbeat of Timely: you will design, build, and continuously improve the cloud-native platform that powers every schedule our AI generates for thousands of educators and students across 15 states. Your code directly determines how quickly we can ship new features, how confidently we can scale to the next 100 districts, and how securely we protect sensitive student data.
• • Architect and deliver end-to-end platform solutions spanning AWS infrastructure (EKS, Lambda, RDS, S3), Infrastructure-as-Code with Terraform, container orchestration, CI/CD pipelines via GitHub Actions, and shared Python libraries that accelerate every product squad.
• • Champion observability and reliability: implement distributed tracing, metrics, and alerting so that any engineer can understand system health in under 60 seconds; own periodic on-call rotation and post-incident reviews to turn outages into durable learning.
• • Reduce developer friction by 10×: create self-service tooling, golden-path templates, and automated test environments that let a new engineer ship their first production PR on day one; maintain living documentation and run internal tech talks to spread best practices.
• • Drive strategic technology decisions—evaluate build vs. buy for auth platforms, choose between managed MongoDB Atlas or self-hosted clusters, decide when to extract micro-services from our monolith—then socialize the decision across engineering, product, and customer success.
• • Mentor and level-up the team: conduct architecture reviews, pair program on gnarly refactors, and provide actionable feedback that turns mid-level engineers into confident technical leaders; build a culture where knowledge-sharing is the default.
• • Collaborate cross-functionally with product managers, school schedulers, and customer success to translate real-world educator pain points into elegant technical solutions; occasionally jump into React front-end code to unblock a feature when the impact is high.
• • Operate with the urgency and ownership of a seed-stage startup while enjoying the stability of a proven, cash-flow-positive business—expect autonomy, rapid iteration, and direct feedback from district superintendents who rely on your platform every day.