Software Engineer, Full Stack Developer, Software Architect

Position: Staff Software Engineer
Job Description

Help set the technical direction for the digital future of educational travel! At EF Educational Tours, we're on a mission to open the world through education, adventure, & cultural immersion... and we're scaling our digital experiences to match that ambition! As our Staff Software Engineer, you'll be one of the most senior individual contributors on the team, setting architecture and technical direction across the customer-facing websites, portals, and internal platforms that power multiple products and markets.

You'll lead from the front end out: owning how our web platform is built, how it performs, and how it scales. All while working across the stack with engineers, designers, marketers, and product managers to ship personalized, performant, and impactful experiences.

What You'll Do

• Set the technical direction for our web platform and the standards that our applications are built on (React, Next.js, Type Script, Node.js)
• Make and document architecture decisions that span multiple applications and teams, balancing speed today with maintainability tomorrow
• Guide system design across the stack—GraphQL APIs, Salesforce and other integrations, headless CMS, and cloud infrastructure (AWS, Vercel, Cloudflare)
• Own the performance, reliability, security, and accessibility of our customer-facing sites, with Core Web Vitals and SEO treated as first-class requirements
• Lead the modernization of legacy systems, including retiring a legacy CMS through incremental, low-risk migrations
• Raise the bar on quality and developer experience: testing strategy, CI/CD, and infrastructure-as-code
• Use AI-assisted development tools (like Claude & Cursor) thoughtfully, and help the team adopt them in ways that speed us up without compromising quality
• Stay hands-on: build the hardest pieces, prototype new patterns, and review the code that sets the bar for everyone else
• Mentor engineers across levels and grow the team's architectural thinking
• Be the technical voice with product, design, marketing, and business leaders: turn strategy into a technical roadmap and explain trade-offs, risks, and costs in plain terms
• Work closely with subject matter experts across the business to understand how things really work, and turn that knowledge into sound designs
• Build alignment across teams and stakeholders through written proposals, design reviews, and presentations, and drive decisions to closure

What You Bring

• 8–12+ years of software engineering experience, with deep expertise in front-end and web platform engineering
• A track record of setting architecture across multiple applications or teams, not just within one codebase
• Expert-level React, Type Script, and Next.js, including server-side rendering and caching strategies Strong system design skills: APIs, data flow, distributed services, and failure modes across the full stack
• Full-stack range: backend services in Node.js (or .NET), GraphQL API design, and integrating with enterprise systems such as Salesforce
• Hands-on experience with AWS (Lambda, ECS), modern hosting and edge platforms like Vercel or Cloudflare, and infrastructure-as-code (Terraform or CDK)
• A solid grounding in application security, testing strategy, and web performance at scale
• Hands-on experience using AI coding tools in your daily work, and a clear view on where they help and where they don't
• Excellent communication with technical and non-technical audiences—you can write the proposal, present it to leadership, and bring stakeholders along
• Experience influencing without authority, partnering with leaders and subject matter experts outside engineering to reach decisions

Bonus Skills

• Experience building or scaling a shared component library or design system
• Experience with headless CMS platforms (e.g.,…