HR Product Engineer

WorldStrides; Charlottesville (VA); Hybrid; USD 120,000 - 160,000; Full time

Job summary

WorldStrides is seeking an HR Product Engineer to co-create high-leverage HR solutions using AI-assisted development. You'll embed with HRBPs, TA, Total Rewards, People Ops, and L&D to identify opportunities like job architecture platforms, automated compensation bands, smarter recruiting workflows, or AI decision support.

The role blends product, engineering, and HR domain expertise. You will own outcomes, partner with IT for security approvals, and drive pilots from discovery through

Qualifications

• 3+ years in HR technology or builder role with outcome ownership.
• Full-stack development across frontend and backend.
• Experience with HRIS/HCM platforms.
• Ability to work with AI tooling and patterns.
• Strong communication with HR leaders and engineers.

Responsibilities

• Discovery: embed with HR stakeholders to identify leverage and quantify savings.
• Build: design and develop front-end and back-end HR tooling with AI integration.
• Deploy: partner with IT to meet security and deployment standards.
• Feed the System: extract patterns to shape the HR tech roadmap and enable adoption.

Skills

HR domain literacy

3+ years HR tech

Full-stack build

AI-assisted development

Experience with HRIS

SQL proficiency

Tools

Azure DevOps

M365/Dataverse

Power Query

Job description

Company Introduction

WorldStrides is the global leader in educational travel and experiential learning. The company was founded in 1967 to provide middle school travel programs to Washington, D.C. and has grown to provide a wide range of programs for more than half a million students annually to over 100 countries around the world. WorldStrides offers experiential learning programs in educational travel, performing arts, language immersion, career exploration, service-learning, study abroad, and sports. Each of these experiences helps students to see beyond the classroom and to see the world – and themselves – in new ways.

Company Introduction

WorldStrides is the global leader in educational travel and experiential learning. The company was founded in 1967 to provide middle school travel programs to Washington, D.C. and has grown to provide a wide range of programs for more than half a million students annually to over 100 countries around the world. WorldStrides offers experiential learning programs in educational travel, performing arts, language immersion, career exploration, service-learning, study abroad, and sports. Each of these experiences helps students to see beyond the classroom and to see the world – and themselves – in new ways.

Job Description

The HR Product Engineer is a hybrid builder who finds the highest-leverage problems inside the HR function, prototypes working solutions with AI-assisted development, and partners with IT engineering to secure deployment approval and ongoing production support.
This is a Product Engineer role scoped to HR. Part product manager, part developer, part HR domain expert. Embeds with HRBPs, Talent Acquisition, Total Rewards, People Ops, and L&D to find where HR can create value, then builds it. That value might be a job architecture platform, an automated comp band tool, a smarter recruiting workflow, or an AI-assisted decision support system for HRBPs. Owns the outcome, not the ticket.

Responsibilities

Discovery: Find the Leverage

• Embed with HR stakeholders to understand how work actually gets done and where the real opportunity is: an unmet HRBP need, a missing capability, a manual process ready for automation.
• Identify and frame opportunities, then qualify them: is the problem material, real, measurable, and feasible to build.
• Build the case for the work. Quantify the prize (hours saved, error reduction, faster cycle time, better HRBP or employee experience) and pressure-test it with Finance and HR leadership before committing build time.

Build: Prove It Works

• Design and build both front-end and back-end capabilities to support HR proof-of-concept and pilot work. Example: a job architecture platform for HRBPs to manage job titles, descriptions, compensation bands, and job levels.
• Use AI-assisted development to move fast. Speed and learning matter more than polish at the POC stage.
• Embed AI directly into HR workflows: automation of manual tasks, decision support tools, chatbots, predictive analytics where the use case earns it.
• Connect prototypes to real systems of record (HRIS, ATS, M365/Dataverse) through approved integration patterns, reading and writing only via sanctioned product-owner requests.
• Run pilots with real HR users, instrument outcomes, and iterate against evidence.

Deploy: Partner with IT, Not Hand Off

• Build to meet IT's security, architecture, and support standards from day one, so deployment approval is a review, not a redesign.
• Partner with IT/engineering to secure deployment approval: security review, data governance sign-off, and production readiness within the org's SDLC.
• Retain ownership of the solution after launch. IT provides infrastructure, security, and support scaffolding, not a full transfer of accountability.
• Establish a clear support model with IT: who owns break/fix, who owns feature evolution, and the escalation path when something breaks.
• Document architecture, decisions, and data flows so IT can support confidently without you being the single point of failure.
• Ensure every solution meets data privacy, security, and compliance standards before it touches real HR data.

Feed the System

• Every project is a live R&D loop for the HR technology roadmap. Surface the patterns, edge cases, and insights that should shape it.
• Label the maturity of what you produce honestly: concept, preliminary, or committed. Directional work should never get mistaken for a commitment.
• Support change enablement so new tools get adopted, not just shipped. Adoption over mandate.
• Partner across HR functions and leadership levels, appreciating differing priorities and ways of working.

Requirements

• Strong HR domain literacy: understands how work actually happens across HRBP, Talent Acquisition, Total Rewards, People Ops, or L&D.
• 3+ years in HR technology, HRIS administration, HR systems development, or a builder role where you owned outcomes rather than executed tickets. Strong candidates from adjacent technical or product roles with real HR systems exposure will be considered.
• Demonstrated full-stack build ability: you can stand up a working front end and wire it to back-end logic and data.
• Evidence you've run discovery with HR stakeholders: talked to HRBPs or People leaders, understood their problem, translated it into something you built. State the outcome explicitly.
• AI-assisted development fluency: you build with AI tools (coding agents, LLM application patterns), not around them. We weight your ability to learn new AI tooling fast well above which specific tools you've used before.
• Hands-on experience with at least one HRIS/HCM platform (ADP, Workday, SAP SuccessFactors, Oracle HCM, or similar).
• Technical proficiency in data analysis, system configuration, and troubleshooting.
• Clear written and verbal communication. You can explain a tradeoff to an HR leader and a data model to an engineer in the same afternoon.
• Bias toward shipping. A rough working prototype in front of an HRBP this week beats a perfect plan next month.

Strongly Preferred

• Experience integrating applications with enterprise systems of record via APIs (HRIS, ATS, payroll).
• Familiarity with the Microsoft ecosystem (Azure, Azure DevOps, Dynamics/Dataverse, M365) or the ability to ramp into it quickly.
• Exposure to LLM application development: prompt design, retrieval-augmented patterns, agent/tool-use chains, and especially evaluation design (catching hallucinations and regressions before they reach a pilot or touch employee data).
• Knowledge of AI/ML applications in HR: predictive attrition or retention models, chatbots, comp and job-architecture automation, candidate matching.
• Knowledge of ADP, Greenhouse, and/or Docebo is a plus.
• Proficiency in SQL, Power Query, or similar tools for HR data manipulation.
• Project management experience running HR technology initiatives end to end.
• Comfort working inside messy, real-world HR constraints: legacy workflows, fragmented data across systems, and compliance gates like pay equity and data privacy.

Qualifications

Technical

• Front-end: React, modern JS/TypeScript, responsive UI.
• Back-end and data: API design and integration, SQL, relational data modeling, comfort reading and writing to HR systems of record under governance.
• AI-assisted build: coding agents and AI development tools; LLM application patterns including prompting, RAG, tool and agent orchestration, and eval design.
• Engineering hygiene: version control and trunk-based development, PR and peer review, secrets kept out of source control, SSO/AD-based identity. CI/CD and observability familiarity is a plus.
• Environment: Microsoft-ecosystem aligned (SSO/AD, Azure DevOps, M365), with HRIS/HCM and ATS platforms as the primary systems of record.

HR Domain and Product

• Deep understanding of core HR processes: job architecture