Senior Software Engineer, Infrastructure

Clever Inc.; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 170,000 - 237,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive salary

Flexible Paid Time Off

Paid Parental Leave

Top-notch healthcare, vision, and dental coverage

Best-in-class mental healthcare service

Generous personal development budget

Comprehensive Learning & Development program

Annual company and team events

Job summary

Clever Inc. is on the lookout for a Software Engineer to join the Infrastructure team in San Francisco. The role involves technical leadership in building and evolving the platform that supports Clever's products. You will collaborate closely with product engineering teams to improve automation, security, and compliance.

Ideal candidates will have a minimum of 4 years of backend experience, proficiency with Kubernetes, and a commitment to fostering an equitable workplace.

Qualifications

• 4+ years of experience as a Software Engineer including backend work.
• Direct experience using a cloud provider (e.g. AWS, GCP, Azure).
• Commitment to equity and belonging in the workplace.

Responsibilities

• Act as technical lead for medium and large projects.
• Build and evolve an internal developer platform with defined workflows.
• Collaborate with product engineering teams to improve platform capabilities.

Skills

Experience with Kubernetes

Empathy in understanding fellow engineers' pain points

Ability to learn quickly

Tools

AWS EKS

Go

AWS ECS

MongoDB

Postgres

DynamoDB

Job description

Clever is on a mission to connect every student to a world of learning. As the leading identity platform for education, more than 111,000 schools worldwide use Clever to power secure digital learning experiences. With Clever's layered security solutions, schools can protect access and identities for all staff, teachers, and students. With a secure identity platform for schools and a network of leading application providers, Clever is committed to advancing education with technology that works for students everywhere. Clever, a Kahoot! company, has an office in San Francisco, CA, but you can visit us at clever.com anytime.

The Infrastructure team handles platform engineering at Clever. It builds and evolves the internal developer platform that engineering teams use to build, deploy, operate, and monitor Clever's products. As a member of the Infrastructure team, you'll create self‑service "golden paths" and shared tooling that help teams ship and iterate quickly and safely, while meeting reliability, security, and compliance expectations. You will partner with engineering teams to understand friction points, close gaps in automation and workflows, and continuously improve the developer experience and operational effectiveness across the organization.

A Day in the Life

• Act as technical lead for, and contribute meaningfully to, medium and large projects
• Build and evolve an internal developer platform with clear self‑service workflows("golden paths") that makes it easy for Clever engineers to build, deploy, and scale well‑architected applications.
• Define and maintain standards, templates, and automation that help teams ship quickly and safely without sacrificing reliability, security, or compliance.
• Collaborate with product engineering teams to understand friction points, gather requirements, and iterate on platform capabilities as an internal product.
• Provide observability primitives (logging, metrics, tracing, alerting) and opinionated defaults so teams can operate services effectively with minimal toil.
• Implement multi‑region capabilities, including repeatable environment provisioning, resiliency patterns, and fast region failover.
• Lead resiliency initiatives and implement reliability engineering practices to meet or exceed 99.98% uptime for critical services.
• Model and reinforce Clever's engineering culture and practices, including collaboration, operational excellence, and continuous improvement. See our blog post on Defining Clever's Engineering Culture.
• Current and upcoming projects include: migrating services and compute from AWS ECS to AWS EKS and EC2, evolving our internal developer platform to support that shift, and expanding Clever globally by deploying regionally replicated infrastructure to meet customer data‑sovereignty requirements.
• Note: Infrastructure's codebase is primarily Go, but we support teams writing code in using Typescript for Node.js and frontend as well. We build tooling and encode best practices across a variety of cloud solutions including MongoDB, Postgres, DynamoDB, Docker, and many AWS services (ECS, Step Functions, etc).

What We're Looking For

• 4+ years of experience as a Software Engineer including backend work
• Experience with Kubernetes is required
• Experience with Go is useful but not required
• Experience with AWS EKS is useful but not required
• Direct experience using a cloud provider (e.g. AWS, GCP, Azure)
• Experience with our key AWS Technologies (ECS, DynamoDB, VPCs, Lambda, RDS, Kinesis) helpful but not required
• Ability to empathize with fellow engineers to understand their pain points and improve their developer experience
• The desire and ability to learn quickly in order to support the wide range (and ever‑changing list) of technologies in use at Clever
• Design and product sense for building as an internal infrastructure/platform team
• Commitment to equity and belonging. At Clever, we believe the classrooms we serve and our company's halls should be spaces that are diverse, equitable, and inclusive. That is why we are committed to building diverse teams, inviting every voice, and creating a safe space for everyone to be their authentic self. By fostering equity and belonging within our circles of influence, we unlock learning for ALL students.

Clever Benefits and Perks

• A competitive salary
• Flexible Paid Time Off
• Paid Parental Leave
• Top‑notch healthcare, vision, and dental coverage for you and your family
• Best‑in‑class mental healthcare service that supports employees' mental and emotional wellness
• A generous personal development yearly budget which can be used for courses, conferences, trainings, books, and more
• A comprehensive Learning & Development program that enables employees to enhance their skills, knowledge, and functional expertise
• Annual company and team events to connect with fun, bright coworkers

Salary Transparency

The range of our base salary cash compensation for this role for candidates living in the United States, besides NYC and San Francisco, CA, is between $155,000 - $216,000. For candidates living in NYC and San Francisco, CA is between $170,000 - $237,000. All final offers are determined using multiple factors including experience and level of expertise.

Clever does not conduct interviews via text or Telegram. We will never ask for your financial information or reimbursement of equipment of any kind. If you receive any communications regarding employment with Clever that you think might be a scam, please email [e-mail].

If you are a resident of Colorado, please note you have the right to redact your age‑related information like age, birth date, or dates of schooling.