Software Engineer - Backend & Infrastructure

About the RoleWe are looking for a backend-focused software engineer who has shipped production systems and knows what it takes to keep them running. This is a hands-on role from day one. You will write real code, own real systems, and work directly on the infrastructure that powers a real-time, compliance-sensitive platform.You should be comfortable building in ambiguity, making pragmatic tradeoffs, and taking something from zero to production without a lot of hand-holding.This is one of those early seats that genuinely changes where your career goes. You will not be a cog in a large engineering org. You will be in the room where decisions get made, and the work you do here will be visible, consequential, and yours. What You'll DoBuild and maintain scalable backend services and APIs from scratch. Design and implement real-time features including chat, messaging, and event streaming. Write and own database schemas, queries, and performance optimizations. Build and enforce secure access control logic including RBAC and row-level security. Contribute to cloud infrastructure, deployment pipelines, and containerization. Instrument systems with logging, metrics, and traces so issues surface before users notice them. Collaborate directly with the founding team to shape architecture decisions and engineering standards. What We Need (Non-Negotiable)You have shipped at least one production application that real users depend on. You have hands-on experience building real-time or event-driven systems, whether that is chat, notifications, live feeds, or similar. You understand how to design APIs that are clean, versioned, and built to last. You have worked with SQL databases at a meaningful depth, including schema design, indexing, and query tuning. You know how authentication and authorization work end to end, not just how to drop in a library. You have deployed to a cloud provider (AWS, GCP, or Azure) and understand what you are actually deploying to. You can read a broken system and know where to start debugging, whether it is slow queries, a backed-up queue, or a misconfigured service. Technical Skills We Are Looking ForBackend development in one or more of: Node.js, Go, Python, or similar. REST API design and implementation. PostgreSQL or equivalent relational database with real schema ownership. Basic familiarity with message queues or event streaming (Redis, Pub/Sub, Kafka, or NATS). Understanding of Docker and how containerized services are deployed and run. Working knowledge of CI/CD and what a healthy deployment pipeline looks like. Comfort reading and writing infrastructure configuration, even if you are not a DevOps specialist. Good to HaveExperience with WebSockets or other real-time transport mechanisms. Exposure to compliance or security-conscious environments (FERPA, SOC 2, HIPAA, or similar). Prior work in an early-stage or 0 to 1 environment. Familiarity with observability tooling like Grafana, Datadog, or OpenTelemetry. Row-level security in PostgreSQL or a similar database. Any background in EdTech or university systems is a bonus but nowhere near required. What We Actually Care AboutYou have built things that are running right now, not just in a portfolio. You know what breaks in production and you have fixed it before. You write code that the next person can understand and build on. You ask good questions before you start building and you push back when something does not make sense. You take ownership of the outcome, not just the task. What This Is NotThis is not a junior role dressed up as mid-level. This is not a place where you will spend six months in Jira before touching a real system. This is not a theoretical or architecture-only position. What We OfferCompetitive salary plus meaningful equity. You are joining at a stage where the team is small, the product is real, and the trajectory is genuinely open. Engineers who come in early and perform well here will have a natural path into senior technical leadership as the team grows. This is the kind of opportunity where in two years you could be leading a team and owning an entire system you helped build from scratch. We are not promising titles. We are promising that the growth will be real because the work demands it.BenefitsICHRACompany Technical Equipment Free Company Housing