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EdTech, E-learning, SaaS

Senior Software Engineer, Back End

United StatesRemoteFull TimeSenior$130,000–$157,500 /yrPosted 2 months agoVisa sponsorship available

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Role summary

Newsela is seeking a Senior Backend Software Engineer to join their EveryDay Labs team. This fully remote role focuses on designing, building, and maintaining scalable backend systems for attendance analytics, process management, and family communication tools. The engineer will work with AWS infrastructure, including tools like Terraform, ECS, and RDS/Aurora, and manage large datasets. The position requires 5+ years of experience in backend development, a strong foundation in building scalable systems, and proficiency in AWS. The role offers the opportunity to impact student outcomes in education technology, work on complex systems, and contribute to a mission-driven, collaborative team.

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

    • All offers of employment are contingent upon the successful completion of a background check as part of our pre-employment process.

    Why you’ll love working at Newsela:

  • Health & Wellness: Comprehensive medical benefits with employer contribution to premiums and to HSA accounts. Additional benefits such as pet insurance, free access to the Calm app, and more to help you stay healthy: mind, body, and soul.
  • Work From Home: We are a fully remote company. We provide a monthly tech stipend to support your WFH needs!
  • Supporting ALL Families: Inclusive benefits to support you and your family, including parental leave, fertility support, adoption, and more!
  • Financial Wellbeing: Invest in your future with our 401(k) plan, which includes a employer match to help you build long-term financial security.
  • Time Off: Flexible PTO plus 10 company holidays plus winter break (Dec 24th - Jan 1st).
  • Professional Development: Newsela offers an annual learning and development allowance to employees to attend external training sessions, classes, workshops, conferences, and educational materials to foster professional growth within their current role and career aspirations at Newsela.
  • Make A Difference: No matter your role or department, the work you do each day helps share the future of education and improves the lives of students and teachers.

    • 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.

    #LI-Remote

    Final compensation will be determined based on the candidate’s individual skills, qualifications, and experience. Total compensation for this role also includes incentive stock options and benefits.

    Base Compensation Range
    $130,000—$157,500 USD

    Sample Newsela interview questions

    • 1

      Design a real-time analytics engine for large datasets.

      system designmedium
    • 2

      Design a real-time chat application.

      system designmedium
    • 3

      Vertical Order Traversal Perform a vertical order traversal of a binary tree. Input: root = [1,2,3,4,5,6,7] Output: [[4],[2],[1,5,6],[3],[7]] Explanation: Traverses the tree maintaining column indices, seamlessly grouping nodes that share the exact same vertical alignment.

      codingmedium
    • 4

      Merge Overlapping Intervals Merge overlapping intervals in an array. Input: intervals = [[1,4],[4,5]] Output: [[1,5]] Explanation: The intervals touch exactly at the 4 mark, so they are successfully merged into a single continuous interval.

      codingmedium
    • 5

      Dot Product of Two Sparse Vectors Calculate the dot product of two sparse vectors. Input: nums1 = [0,1,0,0,2], nums2 = [0,0,0,0,5] Output: 10 Explanation: Multiplies the aligned non-zero values (2 * 5) and ignores all the zeros, yielding a dot product of 10.

      codingmedium

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