Senior Software Engineer

Salary: $160,000-$190,000 per year, plus benefits

The Modern Classrooms Project (MCP) is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization that empowers educators to build classrooms that respond to every student’s needs. Founded by two award-winning teachers, we lead a movement of educators in implementing a self‑paced, mastery‑based instructional model that leverages technology to foster human connection, authentic learning, and social‑emotional growth.

To date, we have reached over 100,000+ teachers through our free online course in 150+ countries. We are an ambitious, idealistic team led by former classroom teachers, and we are passionate about what we do.

For the past eight years, we have empowered educators to use technology more effectively. Last year, we secured funding to begin developing our own edtech software products.

We need an experienced, hands‑on, AI‑native Senior Software Engineer to help transform our product vision into reality. You will be a foundational member of our new technical team, taking the lead on back‑end and generative AI content pipelines, and creating intuitive, powerful tools that will directly support educators and students every day.

You will:

• Ship multiple substantial features per week. This is a minimum velocity bar, not an exaggeration. You will leverage AI and agentic coding to build incredible software, very, very quickly.
• Operate as the technical lead and steward of your agentic coding pipeline. Write detailed prompts and specifications, and embrace Spec‑Driven Development. Compose orchestrator agents and dispatch agent teams. Engineer RALPH Loops with well‑formed completion promises. Actively multitask between several agents to simultaneously develop multiple substantial features in parallel.
• Build the AI workflow engine that powers our products. Develop state‑of‑the‑art graph‑based agentic orchestration workflows with nodes and conditional edges, structured outputs, interrupts and human‑in‑the‑loop circuit breakers. Implement durable execution, long‑running work that survives process restarts, rate limits and outages, with an evaluation harness, versioned prompt chains, annotated datasets and cross‑provider benchmarks on cost, latency and quality.
• Architect resilient, high‑scale back‑end systems. Design and scale distributed infrastructure across Python and Type Script to support heavy edtech workloads. Own the systems design, API boundaries and database performance, ensuring that our foundational architecture remains highly available, secure and ready to scale.
• Extend the context layer. Contribute to our AGENTS.md and Agent Skills so that every session produces better work than the last. These are living production artifacts, and you own the parts that describe your domain.
• Partner on architecture. Collaborate closely with the Head of Engineering, Chief Innovation Officer and other product leaders on technical direction, feature roadmap and the hard technical design decisions and trade‑offs underneath.
• Raise the bar for the team. Review the work of teammates and contractors. Collaborate with teammates on architecture and implementation reviews. Write PR comments, design docs and agent skills that make the next person faster.

• You are AI‑native. You are an expert in continuous multi‑session development with Claude Code and/or OpenAI Codex. You are an expert at prompt engineering and context engineering. You write Agent Skills the way other engineers write unit tests. You practice Spec‑Driven Development as part of your normal workflow. You know what a RALPH Loop is and how to deploy one.
• You ship, a lot. You deliver multiple large features per week. Not because you’re cutting corners, but because you’ve rebuilt your workflow around agentic tools and you have the taste to steer them well. You know the difference between vibe‑coding and prompt engineering with specification‑driven work, and you know which one to reach for in which situation.
• You have built real back‑end AI orchestration layers that run when you’re not watching. You think in graphs – shared state flowing through nodes,…