Staff Product Engineer

OpenEd; Northern (KY); Hybrid; USD 140,000 - 190,000; Full time

Job summary

OpenEd is seeking a Staff Product Engineer to tackle the toughest problems across our stack. You’ll shape the direction of mission critical systems, owning outcomes and mentoring a growing team as you partner with the CTO to define long-term engineering strategy.

You will work in a fast, fullstack monolith built with Next.js, TypeScript, and Postgres, prioritizing velocity, reliability, and developer experience in a highly visible education technology platform.

Qualifications

• 8+ years building software, owning outcomes at fast-growing companies.
• Deep in TypeScript, React, Next.js, and Node with strong PostgreSQL skills.
• Designed and shipped complex systems crossing team boundaries (payments, workflows, data integrity).
• Able to reason from first principles and communicate clearly to non-technical audiences.

Responsibilities

• Own the design of mission critical systems with the most risk (wallets, ledgers, enrollments).
• Lead cross-functional initiatives and drive architectural decisions.
• Set engineering standards; lead design and code reviews to uplift the team.
• Own data modeling and ensure robust data systems across services.
• Define reliability targets (SLIs/SLOs) and lead incident response.
• Automate manual work into resilient systems and tooling.
• Protect student PII and financial data with compliant controls.
• Mentor engineers and translate strategy into roadmaps.

Skills

8+ years software engineering

System design

Tools

TypeScript

React

Next.js

Node.js

PostgreSQL

Job description

About OpenEd
At OpenEd, we’re opening the world to every learner. With over 100,000 students served and growing rapidly, families trust us as a partner to the most precious thing in their lives, their children. Our vision: a future where education is no longer constrained by geography, rigid models, or outdated systems. Our mission: to give every student customized, world-class education and resources, empowering families and opening millions of doors for learners across the country.

Our Culture (The Foundation of Everything We Do)
Culture at OpenEd is intentional. It’s defined by what we promote—and what we tolerate. Our latest eNPS (employee net promoter score) of 79 places OpenEd in the top .1% of technology companies. Our values aren't just words; they are non-negotiable principles that guide every decision:

• Customer First – Obsessed with delivering value; we fight tirelessly for our learners and families.

• Hard Choices, Easy Life – Face challenges directly, swiftly, and transparently.

• I Did > We Should – Action over theory; bring experiments, not just opinions.

• Learn Out Loud – Share your growth openly; feedback is a gift, ego is the enemy.

• Prioritize Ruthlessly – Excellence in the few critical areas over mediocrity everywhere.

• Fast AND World Class – Speed doesn’t compromise quality.

• Strong Opinions, Weakly Held – Advocate passionately, adjust readily.

• Make Others Famous – Elevate your colleagues, partners, and community.

We're currently accepting applications from those living in: AR, AZ, CO, FL, GA, ID, IN, IL, IO, KS, KY, MA, MD, MN, MO, MT, ND, NC, NM, NV, NY, OH, OK, OR, RI, SC, TN, TX, UT, VA, WA, WI, WV.

About the role

OpenEd empowers tens of thousands of families to customize their child's education by blending the best of homeschool, public school & tech. We partner with innovative school districts and homeschool families to create personalized learning programs that unlock the best in every student. We do the most important work of our lives because families trust us with the most important part of theirs: their kids.

So what does that mean in practical terms? We build software to tackle a wide range of problems:

• Financial transactions, money movement, ecommerce flows

• Multi-state regulatory compliance

• Tracking learning, attendance, state testing, and more

• Consumer-grade, polished user experiences

• Highly scalable, robust backend systems
  

As a Staff Product Engineer, you’ll be responsible for the toughest problems across the whole stack. You’ll set direction and own the outcomes of our mission critical systems, working directly with the CTO to plan and implement long term engineering strategy. You’ll raise the effectiveness of the entire team around you through mentoring and implementing smart processes to encourage the “pit of success” for the whole team. We focus heavily on software that runs itself; we build the factory.

We work fast in a fullstack monolith environment built on Next.js, Typescript, and Postgres. We highly value iteration speed and developer experience (i.e. every PR has a complete preview deployment with fully mocked services and isolated, production-like data). You’ll be equally at home in the frontend experience families touch and the backend systems that move money, provision accounts, and manage compliance.

Responsibilities:

• Own the design of mission critical systems with the most risk: wallets and ledgers, the complete lifecycle of an enrollment, reimbursement reviews, and the flows that move money and student records between districts, families, and vendors.

• Identify and tackle cross-cutting problems with no clear owner - and land them.

• Set engineering standards. Lead design and code review. Make the team's work better without doing it all yourself.

• Own data modeling and system design. Guide and hold the team accountable to robust data modeling.

• Own reliability: define SLIs and SLOs, build the monitors, lead incident response, run blameless postmortems, and turn what we learn into fixes.

• Build the “factory lines”, not just better tools. Turn manual work - checks, reviews, reports, rollouts, data fixes, documentation - into systems that run autonomously with oversight.

• Guard student PII and company funds: FERPA, state audits, traceability. Partner with Security and Legal.

• Mentor engineers. Grow their judgment, not just their output.

• Represent engineering with Product and leadership. Turn strategy into a roadmap, and even more importantly, push back when the plan is wrong.
  

Who you are:

• 8+ years building software, including time at small or fast-growing companies where you owned outcomes not just tickets.

• Deep in TypeScript, React, Next.js, and Node, with strong PostgreSQL skills: schema design, transactions, locking, query performance.

• You have designed and shipped complex systems that cross team lines — payments, ledgers, workflows, integrations — and lived with them in production.

• You reason from first principles and can explain why a system behaves the way it does.

• You are biased for action: you’ve been reigned in more than you’ve been nudged on.

• You are excited and wary about AI; you are looking for ways to leverage it more, but without abdicating ownership or devolving into a meat proxy.

• You have set technical direction for a team and mentored engineers.

• You don’t accept “we’ll do better next time” as a valid retro followup.

• You value simplicity over cleverness.

• You hold a ruthlessly high bar for the product experiences you build. There’s no such thing as user error - we just didn’t make it easy/safe enough.

• You have handled sensitive data and real money and know what goes wrong.

• You write clearly, and write to think. Whether it’s design docs, incident reports, or Slack, you can communicate complex ideas with simplicity and clarity for non-technical audiences.

• You care about opening up education, providing more options and choices for families.
  

Preferred:

• Experience building event driven, async, workflow-heavy systems (Kafka, Temporal, Inngest)

• Experience leveraging AI to automate developer workflows while balancing oversight and accountability

• Experience in K-12 education, or in any regulated / compliance focused vertical (finance, healthcare, etc)

EEO Statement

OpenEd is an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, gender, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, national origin, genetics, disability, age, or veteran status.

OpenEd participates in E-Verify.