Senior Software Engineer, Full-Stack — Content Tools

About Us

Epic Kids is the leading digital reading platform built for kids 12 and under, trusted by millions of children, educators, and families around the world. Our mission is to inspire a lifelong love of reading by providing unlimited access to thousands of high-quality books, videos, and educational content through a safe and engaging experience. We combine technology, storytelling, and learning innovation to help every child become a confident reader.

At Epic, you’ll join a collaborative and fast-paced global team passionate about building meaningful products that make a real impact on children’s education and literacy.

Position Summary

The Senior Software Engineer, Full-Stack — Content Tools owns the internal tools and pipelines that bring Epic's library of books, audio, and learning content from raw assets through to production-ready, app-consumable formats. You will design, build, and operate the Angular-based content workbench and the PHP/Go services behind it—turning long, manual content-prep workflows into automated, high-throughput pipelines, and partnering with our content, editorial, and platform teams to make the tools more capable and the operators more productive.

You are an experienced engineer who works independently on complex problems, makes sound technical decisions, and pulls in the right people when a decision touches another team. Our back-end is multi-language: PHP/Symfony powers our long-standing application code, and we are actively investing in Go for newer services—senior engineers help drive that evolution thoughtfully rather than reflexively rewriting what works.

This role works in close partnership with Epic's global engineering team across the US, China, Spain, and India.

Key Responsibilities

• Design and ship features end-to-end across the content workbench—Angular front-end through PHP/Symfony and Go back-end services, against MySQL—taking ownership from spec to production
• Build and maintain ingestion and conversion pipelines for the content formats Epic relies on—ePUB, PDF, XML, ONIX, and related—transforming embedded data into application-ready output
• Build and operate operator review and correction surfaces for pre-aligned audio/text assets—high-density tooling for verifying, editing, and exporting synchronized multi-format content
• Optimize the PHP 8.x API and supporting services to handle high-volume file transfers and background processing for large media assets (100MB+)
• Lead the development of the interactive Angular UI for the content workbench—high-density operator tooling, coordinate-based interactions over media (e.g., word boxes over book pages), and reactive state management with RxJS / NgRx
• Make sound technical decisions on architecture, data modeling, API design, and state management; document trade-offs and align stakeholders before significant choices land in code
• Drive code quality through thorough code reviews, raising standards on testing, readability, and maintainability across both front-end and back-end codebases
• Mentor mid-level and junior engineers—pair on hard problems, give actionable code-review feedback, and help them grow into larger pieces of work
• Identify and resolve architectural bottlenecks in the content pipeline; reduce manual intervention where automation and better tooling can help
• Lead and contribute to technical design reviews, RFCs, and architecture discussions, grounded in data and prototypes
• Partner cross-functionally with content operations, editorial, product, and platform teams on features that span team boundaries
• Leverage AI-assisted development tools to accelerate delivery, applying the same review and quality bar to generated code as to anything else, and exercising judgment about where they help and where they don't
• Participate in production support of the content tooling, lead investigations, write up post-mortems, and follow through on systemic fixes

Required Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree or higher in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a related field
• 5+ years of professional software engineering experience, including significant time shipping production full-stack features
• Strong Angular experience (v14+ preferred), including component architecture, RxJS reactive patterns, and a state-management library such as NgRx
• Strong proficiency in TypeScript and modern front-end fundamentals (HTML, CSS/SCSS, accessibility, performance)
• Strong PHP experience on a modern framework—Symfony preferred, Laravel acceptable—including Doctrine ORM or equivalent
• Solid working knowledge of Go for back-end services (HTTP handlers, modules, concurrency primitives, the standard library), or demonstrated ability and willingness to come up to production proficiency quickly
• Proficiency designing schemas, writing performant queries, and reasoning about indexing in a relational database—MySQL preferred
• Experience designing and operating REST (or gRPC) APIs that serve real production traffic
• Experience building or operating media or document processing pipelines (PDF / ePUB / XML parsing and transformation, image or audio asset processing) and handling large file payloads safely at scale
• Working knowledge of media-processing tooling such as FFmpeg, ImageMagick, or equivalents for transcoding, resizing, and format conversion
• Experience writing tests at multiple levels—unit, integration, and end-to-end—and a habit of doing so by default
• Comfort with Git, pull-request-based workflows, and modern CI/CD (Jenkins, GitHub Actions, or similar)
• Strong written and verbal communication—able to write a design doc, run a review, and explain trade-offs to non-engineering partners
• Track record of mentoring more junior engineers and raising the bar through review and pairing
• Fluency in English for daily collaboration and technical documentation with a global engineering team

Preferred Skills

• Experience working with digital publishing standards (ePUB, ONIX) and the internal structure of publishing-industry file formats
• Experience with canvas-based UI for drawing, cropping, or annotating over media—cropperjs, wavesurfer.js, or similar browser-based media libraries
• Experience leading the design or migration of a service from one language/runtime to another (e.g., PHP → Go) in a production environment
• Experience with Docker and Kubernetes (GKE) at the application-developer level—building images, debugging running pods, reading logs and metrics
• Experience with cloud platforms—GCP preferred (GCS, Cloud SQL, Pub/Sub, Cloud Run/GKE), AWS or Azure acceptable
• Experience operating against an observability stack—New Relic, Datadog, or similar—including building dashboards and alerts for code you own
• Familiarity with consumer-product concerns at scale: caching strategies, CDN behavior, image/media pipelines, mobile-web performance
• Interest in or experience with ed-tech, children's media, or content-platform work