Staff Engineer

ParentSquare is a rapidly growing Santa Barbara-based company that’s changing the way schools and parents communicate every day. Sound simple? We strive to keep it that way! Our mission is to give schools the power to incredibly enhance family engagement for all students. ParentSquare and RemindHub, our flagship products, serve over 22 million students and drive our mission by providing unified communications tools -forms, sign ups, payments, RSVPs, direct messaging, language translations, chat and more. Remind Chat, our free product, reaches over 80% of K-12 students, providing a safe and easy-to-use platform for direct communication between teachers and families. And our latest innovation, SmartSites, offers state-of-the-art websites for school districts, enhancing their online presence and accessibility. 

We are not just creating a product; we are creating empowered educators and engaged parents to improve the lives of all students.  We are passionate advocates for our  customers and for our employees and we invite you to join us on this exciting journey.

Business is booming and our platform is growing at an incredible pace. As we serve more and larger school districts, we face exciting challenges in scalability, architecture, and long-term technical strategy. To meet these challenges, we need a technical leader to help guide our engineering organization into the future.

We are seeking a Staff Software Engineer to act as a technical force multiplier. You will be a key influencer of our technical vision, tackling our most complex and ambiguous problems that span multiple teams and systems. You will partner with engineering leadership, product managers, and other engineers to ensure the long-term health, security, and scalability of our platform. Your role will go beyond a single feature or sprint; you will be instrumental in setting technical direction, mentoring senior engineers, and ensuring we are building the right systems in the right way.

Most importantly, you’re someone who shares in our passion for improving the lives of students through communication. 

• Drive the architectural vision and long-term technical strategy for major components of the ParentSquare platform.
• Lead the design and implementation of solutions for our most complex, cross-functional technical challenges, ensuring solutions are scalable, secure, and maintainable.
• Mentor and level-up Senior Engineers through design reviews, code reviews, and direct technical guidance, fostering a culture of technical excellence.
• Act as a technical expert and point of escalation for critical system incidents, leading debugging efforts on our most challenging production issues.
• Author technical design documents, RFCs, and architecture diagrams to articulate and align teams on complex technical decisions.
• Identify and champion improvements to our engineering processes, standards, and tooling to increase team velocity and product quality.
• Collaborate with engineering and product leadership to influence the product and technical roadmap, anticipating future needs and challenges.

• Extensive experience designing, building, and operating large-scale, distributed systems on a cloud platform like AWS.
• Demonstrated expertise in our core technologies, including Ruby/Python, JavaScript/TypeScript, and PHP, with a deep understanding of system architecture.
• Proven track record of making significant technical contributions to the architecture and design (architecture, design patterns, reliability, scaling) of complex systems.
• Experience leading large, complex technical projects from inception to completion with minimal oversight.
• Expertise with relational databases (MySQL/Postgres) and messaging queues (SQS) at scale.
• Excellent communication skills, with the ability to articulate complex technical concepts to both technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Bachelor’s degree (or higher) in Computer Science or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
• A passion for mentoring other engineers and a proven ability to raise the technical bar for a team or organization.

You’ll get your foot in the door as our company continues to grow. We’re big believers in work-life balance and provide:

• Employer-paid health insurance (including dependent coverage)
• An employer-matched 401K retirement savings program from day 1 
• Paid Parental Leave
• Stock options
• Health + wellness reimbursements
• PTO that increases each year
• 15 paid holidays, including your birthday! 

As a fully remote team, we’ll make sure you have all the tools and equipment you need to make your home office a place where you can thrive. 

We're an equal opportunity employer. All applicants will be considered for employment without attention to age, race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, veteran or disability status.

The salary range for this role will be $180,000-$220,000, DOE.