Staff AI Software Engineer, Data Systems

Our Mission and Opportunity

Early education is one of the most important determinants of childhood outcomes, a critical support for working families, and a $175B market that remains underserved by modern technology. Brightwheel is the largest, fastest growing, and most loved platform in early ed, trusted by millions of educators and families every day. We are a three-time Cloud 100 company, backed by top investors including Addition, Bessemer, Emerson Collective, Lowercase Capital, Notable Capital, and Mark Cuban.

Our Team

About The Role

Our team builds the platform that thousands of early education programs rely on every day to run their business, serve families, and support children’s growth. As a vertical SaaS company, brightwheel already sits in the middle of all the key workflows in early education: enrollment, billing, staffing, classroom planning, and family communication. We are now extending that foundation into a system of action – where software not only records what happened, but also anticipates work, recommends next steps, and takes safe, automated action on behalf of school leaders, teachers, families, and our internal teams.

We’re looking for an AI-native software engineer to join our data engineering team. This is a builder role for someone who wants to make messy operational data useful, trustworthy, and ready for AI to reason over, and then put it to work: both as intelligent products in the hands of the people making decisions, and as trusted data delivered to the enterprise customers and government agencies that depend on it. You will build the data foundations, AI products, and standardized integrations across brightwheel's data systems that give teams and customers answers they can trust and act on. You will turn raw operational data into reliable systems that shorten the path from question to decision and raise the bar on how much people rely on the numbers, inside brightwheel and out.

The best candidates do not wait for perfect requirements. They prototype quickly, validate assumptions with users or internal teams, define success metrics, and iterate in production. They use AI agents, coding tools, scripts, and automation to move faster, while raising the bar for quality, reliability, privacy, security, and customer trust.

What You’ll Do

• Own meaningful problems from discovery through launch, measurement, and iteration.
• Use AI to improve both how you build and what brightwheel can deliver.
• Prototype quickly, validate assumptions, and use working software to create clarity.
• Raise the bar for quality, reliability, security, privacy, observability, and execution.
• Build data foundations that let brightwheel reason safely across customer, product, billing, classroom, and operational workflows.
• Design systems for canonical data models, identity resolution, data contracts, retrieval, provenance, uncertainty handling, access control, and observability.
• Build standardized integrations that deliver data to enterprise customers and government agencies at scale.

You may be a good fit if you

• Have 5+ years of professional software engineering experience.
• Have strong engineering fundamentals and can reason across systems, data, APIs, product surfaces, and infrastructure.
• Have owned production work from problem definition through launch and iteration.
• Use AI tools and agents as a real part of your engineering workflow, not as a novelty.
• Can explain how you have increased your own velocity without lowering your quality bar.
• Have examples of automating your own work, your team’s work, or broader company workflows.
• Are comfortable operating in ambiguity and turning unclear problems into shipped software.
• Communicate clearly and work well across functions.
• Care deeply about privacy, security, reliability, and customer trust.

Strong candidates may also have

• Experience shipping AI-powered products, workflows, or internal tools to production.
• Experience with retrieval, tool use, evaluation, monitoring, orchestration, or agent workflows.
• Experience in vertical SaaS, education, fintech, healthcare, CRM, ecommerce, or another operations-heavy domain.
• A portfolio of personal projects, internal tools, open-source work, writing, demos, or side projects that shows builder energy and taste.
• Experience building data systems and integrations that made product, operational, or AI workflows more reliable, for consumers inside and outside the company.
• Experience with data modeling, identity resolution, retrieval, provenance, governance, or AI-safe data access.
• Experience delivering data to external enterprise or government partners through data shares or file exports, including the privacy and compliance handling that comes with sharing sensitive data.

Technology

• Backend: Ruby on Rails, Sidekiq
• Data: PostgreSQL on Amazon RDS, Redis, and event and analytics pipelines
• Frontend: React with TypeScript
• Mobile: Native iOS with Swift and Android with Kotlin and Jetpack Compose
• Cloud and Infrastructure: Docker, Kubernetes on Amazon EKS, GitHub Actions and FluxCD for CI/CD, and AWS services such as S3, CloudFront, CloudWatch, and SNS
• AI and Automation: AWS Bedrock and other hosted large language models, vector search, orchestration and agent frameworks, and modern AI coding tools like Cursor, Claude Code, and Codex

_Brightwheel is committed to creating a diverse and inclusive work environment and is an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, gender, gender identity, gender expression, sexual orientation, national origin, genetics, disability, age, or veteran status.

Protecting Our Applicants: Please be aware of recruiting scams impersonating Brightwheel. All legitimate communications come from @mybrightwheel.com_ addresses, and we never ask for payment or sensitive personal data as part of our hiring process. If you suspect fraudulent contact, reach out to _security@mybrightwheel.com__. Thank you for helping us keep our applicant community safe.

_Compensation Range: $154K - $237K