Own complex, hands-on backend changes on a focused team entrusted with modernizing critical production systems.
ABOUT SEESAW
Seesaw helps elementary educators deliver joyful, inclusive learning experiences through interactive instruction, digital portfolios, and connections between teachers, students, and families. Our mission is to provide every elementary student with joyful and connected learning experiences that lay the foundation for success in life.
YOUR TEAM
You will join a small, dedicated group of senior engineers assembled specifically for one of Seesaw's most critical technology initiatives. This is not a business-as-usual maintenance assignment: the team has a focused mandate to make consequential improvements to the foundations of our production platform. The group reports directly to our Director of Platforms, who will serve as the team's engineering manager and lead the work day to day. Working closely with experienced Core Platform engineers, you'll have meaningful technical ownership, direct access to engineering leadership, and the opportunity to shape systems that support millions of educators, students, and families. Our emphasis is on thoughtful architecture, hands-on execution, and incremental delivery without compromising security or reliability.
YOUR ROLE
We're looking for a versatile senior backend engineer who can navigate an established SaaS codebase and deliver complex changes across every path a request or event takes: synchronous APIs, background jobs, scheduled tasks, and data pipelines. You'll move comfortably between production services, serverless functions, edge functions, shared libraries, automation, integration tests, and operational tooling. The role is primarily backend-focused and includes authentication and request-routing paths.
YOUR RESPONSIBILITIES
- Improve existing Python backend services, REST and GraphQL APIs, and shared libraries to support evolving platform capabilities.
- Ensure request and job context is carried consistently across APIs, background tasks, scheduled jobs, serverless functions, and event consumers.
- Evolve authentication, session, and request-routing logic, including edge/CDN functions and identity lookups that direct a request to the right backend before application code runs.
- Design and harden asynchronous processing and change-data pipelines with idempotency, retries, replay, backfill, and failure recovery.
- Implement scoped service modernization and integration work in collaboration with specialist engineers.
- Build practical automation for compatibility testing, operational workflows, deployment checks, and safe changes.
- Resolve integration problems across services, jobs, event flows, configuration, and data access layers.
- Adapt third-party integrations (SSO/OAuth providers, email, push, SMS, secrets) so they work correctly across multiple environments and hostnames.
- Expand automated integration, regression, and end-to-end testing to protect customer experiences.
- Instrument and troubleshoot production behaviors and simplify difficult legacy code paths.
WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR
- 7+ years of professional backend engineering experience with meaningful ownership of complex production systems; equivalent demonstrated experience considered.
- Strong Python and AWS skills and experience working in a multi-service SaaS codebase, including both container-based services and serverless functions.
- Deep understanding of partial failures, consistency tradeoffs, concurrency, asynchronous workflows, and idempotency.
- Sound API, authentication, data-access, background job, and production debugging fundamentals.
- Demonstrated success evolving existing services in a live environment without prolonged disruption.
- Ability to make rapid, readable, well-tested changes without sacrificing operational reliability.
- Strong independent delivery, clear communication, and comfort owning consequential work in a small, director-led engineering team.
NICE TO HAVE
- Experience with service modernization or large-scale platform evolution.
- GraphQL APIs, event-driven architectures, message queues, or workflow orchestration.
- CloudFront or comparable edge functions, token/session design, and SSO or OAuth integrations (e.g., Clever, ClassLink, Google).
- DynamoDB Streams or comparable change-data-capture pipelines, and Elasticsearch/OpenSearch indexing.
- Redis/Valkey, websockets, or Aurora/relational stores alongside NoSQL.
- Familiarity with DynamoDB or relational databases, Terraform, and CI/CD workflows.
WHAT SUCCESS LOOKS LIKE
Cross-service changes ship steadily and safely; every request, job, and event path behaves predictably under failure and retry; integration gaps are resolved with automated verification; and operational workflows become more dependable while the platform continues to run at scale.
CONTRACT ENGAGEMENT
This is a senior, hands-on individual-contributor contract opportunity with a dedicated team led by the Director of Platforms. Engagement duration, location/working arrangement, and commercial terms will be discussed during recruiting.
Seesaw values diverse perspectives and welcomes qualified candidates from all backgrounds. We aim to build inclusive teams that reflect the educators, students, and families we serve.
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