Staff Engineer

🇺🇸Remote - Remote (United States)$180K–$230K/yr10h ago

K-12 Engineering Software Engineering Backend Development AI Development Cloud Computing Full Stack Development

Role Snapshot

Staff Engineer at ParentSquare leading technical architecture and AI-forward development practices for a communication platform serving 22+ million students. This role combines high-level technical leadership with hands-on engineering to drive scalable, secure systems and foster an AI-native engineering culture.

Key Responsibilities: Partner cross-functionally with product and executive leadership to architect and evolve systems; evangelize AI development practices and mentor engineers on leveraging LLMs to accelerate velocity; design scalable distributed systems and review architectural decisions across the platform.

Skills & Tools: Deep expertise in Ruby, Python, JavaScript/TypeScript, and PHP; mastery of distributed systems, relational databases (MySQL/Postgres), and AWS infrastructure; AI-native development workflow treating LLMs as primary development partners; strong technical leadership and mentoring capabilities.

Qualifications: Bachelor's degree (or higher) in Computer Science or related field; extensive experience building and scaling large-scale services and distributed systems; demonstrated proficiency with modern development practices and AI integration in software development workflows.

Location: Remote - Remote (United States)

Compensation: $180K–$230K/yr

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Job Description

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.

Who we’re looking for:We are looking for a Staff Software Engineer who operates with a high degree of urgency and a "multiplier" mindset. While this role is one level down from our Principal position, the expectations for technical leadership and architectural influence remain high. We are specifically seeking an AI-forward engineer. To us, this means you are someone who has fundamentally evolved your workflow using LLMs and AI agents. You should be the person in the room who can demonstrate how to use AI to bypass manual boilerplate, accelerate debugging, and ship clear, simple functionality at a pace that traditional methods can't match

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

This role will include:

Cross-Functional Leadership: Partner closely with product owners, executive leadership, design, sales, and marketing to ensure we build the right things as simply as possible
AI Evangelism: Act as the internal champion for AI development practices, mentoring the engineering org on using AI to increase sprint velocity and code quality
Scalable Engineering: Build and run systems that operate robustly at scale while ensuring the highest level of security for the schools that rely on us
Technical Culture: Work with leadership to build a unified technical direction and a culture of excellence and speed.
Architectural Evolution: Review PRs and design the future architecture of our systems, including the evolution of our monolithic architectures

Our ideal candidate will have the following:

Deep Technical Expertise: Mastery of large-scale services using Ruby, Python, JavaScript/TypeScript, and PHP.
Systems Mastery: Deep knowledge of distributed systems, relational databases (MySQL/Postgres), and AWS infrastructure (Aurora, RDS, SQS)
AI-Native Workflow: You treat AI as your primary partner in the development lifecycle, using it to bypass boilerplate and focus on deep architectural work
Collaborative Communicator: You can represent the engineering team in high-stakes discussions with non-technical stakeholders to drive business value
Education: Bachelor’s degree (or higher) in Computer Science or a related field

The perks of working for us are great! 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. We are committed to maintaining a drug-free workplace in compliance with applicable state laws.

The salary range for this role will be $180,000-$230,000, DOE.