Staff AI Product Builder, Brightwheel
$154-237k
Offers Equity
Online platform for early education management
Be an early applicant
Online platform for early education management
501-1000 employees
Be an early applicant
$154-237k
Offers Equity
501-1000 employees
Company mission
To improve education for young children, given the vital importance of early education for later life.
Role
Who you are
- You are a Staff level full-stack builder who is both AI-native and product-minded
- You love taking an ambiguous customer problem, turning it into a clear plan, and shipping a real end-to-end experience that moves a meaningful outcome
- You care about craft and trust in what you ship, and you leave behind reusable building blocks so the next team can move even faster
- You will succeed in this role if you are:
- Driven by outcomes. You care about helping preschools and childcare centers stay full, save time, and serve families better – not just about shipping “an AI feature.”
- AI-native. You treat AI as part of your toolchain: you rely on modern AI coding assistants and IDEs and lightweight automation or orchestration tools to move dramatically faster, and you know when AI adds real leverage versus when a simple service or query is enough
- A product-driving technical leader. You don’t wait for perfect requirements — you validate hypotheses with prototypes, talk to customers and internal teams, define success metrics, and use working software to align others and drive decisions
- Full stack with a platform mindset. You are comfortable designing data models and APIs, implementing backend logic, and building the front-end experiences that sit on top – and you enjoy creating shared services and patterns that other teams can reuse
- Thoughtful about AI’s limits. You understand hallucinations, safety, and evaluation, and you design data flows, UX, and guardrails around those constraints rather than ignoring them
- Security-minded. You handle sensitive school, educator, and family data with care and instinctively look for secure designs and least-privilege access patterns
- 5+ years of professional software engineering experience, with clear ownership of medium-to-large production systems from problem statement and design doc through launch and iteration
- A proven track record of shipping AI-powered products to production, with concrete examples where LLMs meaningfully improved a metric like engagement, time saved, satisfaction, or retention across one or more product areas
- Hands-on experience with large language models (LLMs) in real applications, including prompt and tool design, retrieval-style patterns (such as RAG), and evaluation and monitoring in production
- Strong computer science fundamentals (e.g., data structures, algorithms, and systems design) and a generalist mindset, comfortable moving between backend, data, and UX to get the job done
- Backend engineering skills in at least one modern web stack (such as Ruby on Rails, Python, Go, or Node), plus confidence with relational databases and larger datasets, from data modeling to performant queries and analytics
- Experience building modern web front-ends, ideally with React or a similar component-based framework
- Nice-to-haves:
- Formal training in computer science (4-year CS degree or equivalent depth in core CS topics)
- A portfolio of personal AI projects, open-source work, or writing that shows how you think about applied AI in real-world settings
- Background in vertical SaaS, ecommerce, or other operations-heavy domains
- Experience designing shared platforms or frameworks (for example, internal SDKs, evaluation services, or experimentation tooling) adopted by multiple teams
- A track record of raising the bar for quality and operations: writing secure, testable, maintainable code; automating and simplifying dev/test/ops workflows; writing and reviewing design docs; mentoring other engineers; and contributing to hiring through interviews and feedback
What the job involves
- In this role, you’ll own AI-powered improvements in core brightwheel workflows end-to-end, from opportunity sizing to launch to iteration
- You’ll ship experiences that make administrators and teachers faster and more effective, while creating shared patterns that help the rest of engineering build safely and consistently. You will:
- Design and build cross-cutting AI services (such as retrieval, context, evaluation, and guardrails) that power multiple product areas like classroom workflows, billing, and family communication
- As a hybrid PM+Eng+Data builder: own the end-to-end product loop for the problems you take on: talk to customers and internal teams, define the success metric, design the workflow and user experience, shape the data and evaluation plan, and ship iterative releases from prototype to reliable, scalable production
- Create shared abstractions and tooling for AI – for example, common prompt and tool patterns, logging and monitoring, and reusable components – so other engineers can build on a consistent foundation
- Shape our data and system architecture so AI can safely stitch together longitudinal signals across product, billing, support, and operations and recommend what should happen next, not just report what happened
- Lead by example in AI-augmented engineering, using AI to multiply your own speed, mentoring L2/L3 engineers, and raising the bar for how we design, ship, and operate AI-powered features
- We work with:
- Backend: Ruby on Rails, Sidekiq
- Data: PostgreSQL on Amazon RDS, Redis, and event and analytics pipelines
- Frontend: React with TypeScript and Emotion
- Mobile: Native iOS (Swift) and Android (Kotlin with Jetpack Compose)
- Cloud & Infrastructure: Docker, Kubernetes on Amazon EKS, GitHub Actions and FluxCD for CI/CD, and AWS services such as S3, CloudFront, CloudWatch, and SNS
- AI & Automation: AWS Bedrock and other hosted large language models, vector search, orchestration and agent frameworks, and modern AI coding tools like Cursor
Our take
Childcare and teaching is a profession fraught with pressures and paperwork and yet it remains relatively ill attended to by advances in tech and software. Brightwheel want to revolutionize this, focusing on facilitating the administrative and communicative relationship between schools, carers and parents or guardians.
As tech enters the classrooms there are various apps focusing on the education itself with fewer actually handling the communications for schools. Brightwheel's platform helps increase parental and teacher engagement with students everyday, while helping small education businesses save money, time, and to grow.
Brightwheel is carving out a name for itself as a service valuable for its exciting and useful new updates. It was quick to adapt to school closures too by offering distance learning capabilities and health testing. And on top of this, it also caters to childcare in lower-income areas with a freemium model. Making its a go-to platform for early education.
Freddie
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Insights
-15% employee growth in 12 months
Company
Funding (last 2 of 5 rounds)
Feb 2021
$55m
SERIES C
Oct 2018
$21m
SERIES B
Total funding: $88.8m
Company HQ
Financial District, San Francisco, CA
Leadership
Dave Vasen
(Founder & CEO)Dave started his career at Morgan Stanley, before spending a year at Cisco and 3 years as a Bain Consultant. He worked at Amazon for 2 years, and after taking on several Advisory roles he founded Brightwheel in 2014.
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