Senior Software Engineer

Modern Classrooms Project; Washington (District of Columbia); Hybrid; USD 160,000 - 190,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Employer-sponsored health insurance

Paid Time Off

403(b) retirement plan with employer match

Access to Continuous Learning budget

Remote work flexibility

Job summary

The Modern Classrooms Project is seeking a Senior Software Engineer to be a foundational member of a new technical team. This position involves building AI-native software products, architecting back-end systems, and developing tools to support educators.

You'll deliver multiple features rapidly, lead technical initiatives, and collaborate with product leaders. Competitive salary and benefits include remote work options and a focus on continuous learning, making this an opportunity to shape educational technology.

Qualifications

• Experience with AI-native technologies and software engineering.
• Ability to handle sensitive data following educational standards.
• Self-directed and proactive in a fast-paced environment.

Responsibilities

• Ship multiple substantial features per week using agentic coding.
• Operate as the technical lead on back-end systems.
• Architect resilient, high-scale back-end systems.

Skills

AI-native

Expert in continuous multi-session development

Prompt engineering

Back-end orchestration

Graph-based programming

Tools

Python

TypeScript

LangGraph

Job description

Salary: $160,000-$190,000 per year, plus benefits

Who We Are

The Modern Classrooms Project (MCP) is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization that empowers educators to build classrooms that respond to every student’s needs. Founded by two award-winning teachers, we lead a movement of educators in implementing a self‑paced, mastery‑based instructional model that leverages technology to foster human connection, authentic learning, and social‑emotional growth.

To date, we have reached over 100,000+ teachers through our free online course in 150+ countries. We are an ambitious, idealistic team led by former classroom teachers, and we are passionate about what we do.

Job Description - Why we need you!

For the past eight years, we have empowered educators to use technology more effectively. Last year, we secured funding to begin developing our own edtech software products.

We need an experienced, hands‑on, AI‑native Senior Software Engineer to help transform our product vision into reality. You will be a foundational member of our new technical team, taking the lead on back‑end and generative AI content pipelines, and creating intuitive, powerful tools that will directly support educators and students every day.

Key Responsibilities

You will:

• Ship multiple substantial features per week. This is a minimum velocity bar, not an exaggeration. You will leverage AI and agentic coding to build incredible software, very, very quickly.
• Operate as the technical lead and steward of your agentic coding pipeline. Write detailed prompts and specifications, and embrace Spec‑Driven Development. Compose orchestrator agents and dispatch agent teams. Engineer RALPH Loops with well‑formed completion promises. Actively multitask between several agents to simultaneously develop multiple substantial features in parallel.
• Build the AI workflow engine that powers our products. Develop state‑of‑the‑art graph‑based agentic orchestration workflows with nodes and conditional edges, structured outputs, interrupts and human‑in‑the‑loop circuit breakers. Implement durable execution, long‑running work that survives process restarts, rate limits and outages, with an evaluation harness, versioned prompt chains, annotated datasets and cross‑provider benchmarks on cost, latency and quality.
• Architect resilient, high‑scale back‑end systems. Design and scale distributed infrastructure across Python and TypeScript to support heavy edtech workloads. Own the systems design, API boundaries and database performance, ensuring that our foundational architecture remains highly available, secure and ready to scale.
• Extend the context layer. Contribute to our AGENTS.md and Agent Skills so that every session produces better work than the last. These are living production artifacts, and you own the parts that describe your domain.
• Partner on architecture. Collaborate closely with the Head of Engineering, Chief Innovation Officer and other product leaders on technical direction, feature roadmap and the hard technical design decisions and trade‑offs underneath.
• Raise the bar for the team. Review the work of teammates and contractors. Collaborate with teammates on architecture and implementation reviews. Write PR comments, design docs and agent skills that make the next person faster.

You should apply if:

• You are AI‑native. You are an expert in continuous multi‑session development with Claude Code and/or OpenAI Codex. You are an expert at prompt engineering and context engineering. You write Agent Skills the way other engineers write unit tests. You practice Spec‑Driven Development as part of your normal workflow. You know what a RALPH Loop is and how to deploy one.
• You ship, a lot. You deliver multiple large features per week. Not because you’re cutting corners, but because you’ve rebuilt your workflow around agentic tools and you have the taste to steer them well. You know the difference between vibe‑coding and prompt engineering with specification‑driven work, and you know which one to reach for in which situation.
• You have built real back‑end AI orchestration layers that run when you’re not watching. You think in graphs – shared state flowing through nodes, conditional edges, interrupts and circuit breakers. You have shipped non‑trivial agentic pipelines using LangGraph, Python and TypeScript, or equivalent. You treat durable execution, structured outputs, human‑in‑the‑loop checkpoints and provider‑agnostic model routing as baseline design constraints. You have built evaluation harnesses, annotated datasets and versioned prompt chains as first‑class artifacts.
• You are self‑directed. You thrive in small, high‑autonomy teams and startups where the surface area is broad and the context shifts constantly. You write clearly. You own a problem end‑to‑end without waiting for a ticket to tell you what to do next.
• You love to learn. You’re actively leveraging the latest developments in AI and applying them to enhance both your own and others’ work. You’re also motivated by MCP’s mission and vision, and eager to build teacher‑ and student‑facing products.
• You want to shape the world. You’re motivated to be part of something larger than yourself. You believe that the highest value of your talent is using it to empower others. You’re ready to make a real difference in educators’ and young people’s lives.

It would also be helpful if:

• You have experience building edtech products.
• You have experience handling sensitive and/or confidential data, particularly in an education context (COPPA, CIPA, FERPA, PPRA, SOC 2).

Compensation and Benefits

We aim to offer a competitive compensation package, as well as the opportunity to work in a fast‑growing nonprofit that is on a mission to improve education worldwide.

• Salary: $160,000-$190,000 gross salary per year
• Employer‑sponsored health insurance through CareFirst BlueCross BlueShield
• Employer‑sponsored dental and vision insurance through MetLife
• Participation in Vanguard 403(b) deferred‑compensation plan with 3% employer match
• Paid Time Off, inclusive of: vacation/PTO (20 days), paid holidays, paid parental leave, sick and safe paid time off, Me Days, and the ability to earn paid Comp time off
• Annual budget for MCP‑funded Continuous Learning for the program(s) you request (available after 6 months of continuous full‑time employment)
• FSA and Dependent Care FSA access
• 1× Salary Life Insurance company‑paid coverage
• Access to Wishbone Pet Insurance Benefit
• Ability to work remotely and to set your own hours (within reason)