Remote Contract Senior Software Engineer - Payroll System

EducationSuperHighway; San Francisco (CA); Remote; USD 96,000 - 165,000; Part time

Job summary

EducationSuperHighway is seeking a Contract Senior Software Engineer to join a small engineering team on a payroll/HRIS integration platform. The role starts as a contract with a path to full-time conversion and is remote.

You will help extend the integration layer, work on third-party provider integrations (ADP, Dayforce, Workday, UKG, Rippling), and build scalable background jobs while ensuring secure handling of PII and financial data.

Qualifications

• 7+ years of full-stack engineering experience building production web applications.
• Early-stage startup experience, comfort with ambiguity, and experience building from 0 to 1 or extending an early-stage system with a small team.
• Demonstrated use of AI coding tools as a regular part of your development workflow (Cursor, Copilot, Codex or Claude).
• Mature judgment about AI outputs: knowing when to trust, when to correct, and when to set the tools aside.
• Strong third-party API integration experience, especially payroll/HRIS or vendor APIs.
• Experience modeling relational data for complex, multi-tenant workflows.
• Proven ability to build and maintain reliable background job pipelines with queue tech and observability.
• Secure handling of PII and financial data.
• Comfort deploying and monitoring a production service with DevOps support.
• Clear communication in early-stage, ambiguous environments and ability to read existing code quickly.

Responsibilities

• Build on the existing API-first full-stack platform connecting employers, employees, and payroll systems, and extend toward launch.
• Work with the engineer on integrations with payroll and HRIS providers, including automated data sync and write-back, with more providers added over time.
• Build direct integrations for providers unreachable by an aggregator, starting with Rippling using custom objects or file-based paths.
• Maintain and extend a provider-agnostic integration layer to simplify adding new providers.
• Develop employee enrollment flows and employer dashboards for multi-tenant use, including SSO and IRS checks.
• Design reliable background job pipelines with status tracking, retries, and error visibility for payroll deduction sync.
• Support money movement and reconciliation with a payments/ledgering provider and audit trails.
• Create compliant document workflows for year-end donations with delivery status and recovery.
• Handle sensitive data with strong security practices, including data minimization and hashed identifiers.
• Make architecture decisions balancing speed and long-term extensibility, and document them clearly.

Skills

Full-stack engineering

Startup experience

AI coding tools

Judgment on AI outputs

API integration

Relational data modeling

Background job pipelines

PII data security

Production deployment

Clear communication in ambiguity

Tools

Cursor

GitHub Copilot

Codex

Claude

Job description

EducationSuperHighway is seeking a Contract Senior Software Engineer to join a small engineering team on a payroll/HRIS integration platform. The role starts as a contract with a path to full-time conversion and is remote.

You will help extend the integration layer, work on third-party provider integrations (ADP, Dayforce, Workday, UKG, Rippling), and build scalable background jobs while ensuring secure handling of PII and financial data.