Contract: Senior Software Engineer, Back End

Why You'll Love This Role

As a Sr. Software Engineer you will be part of the EveryDay Labs team within Newsela. Your work will have a direct and meaningful impact on student outcomes helping school districts reduce absenteeism and increase learning time for students who need it most. You’ll have the opportunity to work on both complex, existing systems and build new products from the ground up, giving you meaningful ownership and visibility into how your work drives impact. In this role, you’ll be part of a collaborative and mission-driven team where clean code, thoughtful design, and continuous improvement are core to how we work. You’ll engage in an environment that values constructive feedback, strong engineering practices, and shared problem solving, while also having the space to take initiative and make a tangible difference across our product, team, and the communities we serve.

What You'll Be Doing

• Design, build, and maintain components of our software platform that support attendance analytics, process management, and family communication tools
• Maintain and improve our student and attendance data systems, ensuring they remain performant and scalable as they grow to support tens of millions of records
• Develop new features that enhance product capabilities and drive meaningful outcomes for schools and students
• Automate operational and monitoring processes to support system reliability and scalability
• Optimize and enhance our AWS infrastructure to improve performance, efficiency, and system resilience
• Contribute to technical discussions and help shape practical, scalable solutions, balancing speed, quality, and long-term maintainability
• Partner with cross-functional teams to translate product needs into technical solutions and deliver high-quality outcomes

About You

• 5+ years of experience in software engineering, with a strong foundation in building scalable backend systems
• Advanced proficiency in our core stack (or similar technologies), including:
• Experience working with AWS infrastructure, including tools such as Terraform, ECS, RDS/Aurora, SES, and messaging systems like SQS/SNS
• Proven ability to manage multiple projects and priorities, maintaining strong attention to detail and delivering high-quality work on time
• Strong communication skills, with the ability to clearly articulate technical concepts, trade-offs, and decisions to a range of stakeholders
• Comfortable working in ambiguous and evolving environments, with a proactive and solutions-oriented mindset
• Experience collaborating across teams to drive alignment, communicate progress, and deliver against shared goals
• Experience operating in environments with broad scope and ambiguity, with the ability to work across multiple areas of the stack.
• Experience with education or education technology a plus
• Fluent in English (written and verbal) required

Please note that given the nature of the contract, this role will not be eligible to participate in company-sponsored benefits

About Newsela

Newsela is a leading education technology company dedicated to meaningful classroom learning for every student. We deliver integrated, AI-powered solutions designed to unlock student engagement, empower teachers, and drive meaningful learning outcomes. Our suite of products supports knowledge and skill development, writing practice, daily instruction, assessment, and data-informed decision-making across K–12 classrooms. Grounded in learning science research, Newsela’s solutions integrate content, assessment, and analytics to help educators track progress, understand student outcomes, and deliver high-impact instruction that supports every learner.