Senior Engineer, Brightwheel

• You are a Senior Software Engineer who is both AI-native and product-minded
• You love taking ambiguous growth or operations problems, pulling on the data, and building systems that actually change how people work
• You will succeed in this role if you are:
• Driven by outcomes. You care about increasing enrollment, improving conversion and retention, and expanding childcare supply – 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 (e.g., Claude Code) 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
• Full stack. You are comfortable designing data models and APIs, implementing backend logic, and building the front-end experiences that sit on top
• Thoughtful about AI’s limits. You understand hallucinations, safety, and evaluation, and you design 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
• Comfortable in ambiguity. You like starting from a messy problem, defining the shape of the solution, and iterating quickly with business partners
• Mission-aligned. The idea of using AI not only to grow a business, but also to improve early education and unlock more childcare capacity, resonates with you
• We are open to a variety of backgrounds, but you likely bring:
• 2+ 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 conversion, retention, productivity, or revenue
• 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

Desirable

• In this role, you’ll design and ship AI-powered systems of action for brightwheel’s go-to-market teams and, over time, directly inside our product
• Your work will help preschools and childcare centers stay full and thriving so more children get stable, high-quality care, while saving our customers hours each week. You will:
• Work directly with internal customers across Sales, Marketing, Support, and Customer Success to turn ambiguous growth and workflow pain into clear product opportunities, shaping solutions that balance technical feasibility with measurable business impact
• Build AI agents and workflows that spot which preschools and childcare centers need help, generate the right message, and guide them from first contact to full, stable use of brightwheel
• Ship beautiful and functional user experiences that make our teams better
• Create tools for support and success that resolve issues faster and turn every interaction into a chance to help small businesses run better
• Instrument what you ship, track metrics like enrollment growth, time saved, and account health, and iterate based on real results
• Shape our data and system architecture so AI can stitch together longitudinal signals 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 and sharing patterns that raise the bar for the whole team
• 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