Contract: Senior Software Engineer - Newsela Writing Team

Newsela is a leading education technology company dedicated to meaningful classroom learning for every student. They are seeking a Senior Software Engineer Contractor for the Writing product team to build AI-powered learning experiences and ship full-stack features. The role involves ownership of the full lifecycle of projects, active participation in planning, and improving the team's engineering practices.

Responsibilities:

• Ship full-stack features with measurable product impact
• Provide substantive code review, architectural feedback, not just approvals
• Serve as a first responder for production issues (within working hours): triage, root cause, and preventive measures recommendations
• Improve the team's engineering practice over time: tooling, agentic workflows, technical standards, and documentation that lives where work happens
• Translate product requirements into a technical approach and communicate the reasoning

Requirements:

• 5+ years building production web applications, with a strong full-stack range (modern React/TypeScript frontends and a typed or Pythonic backend)
• Track record of owning ambiguous problems end-to-end and shipping with measurable impact
• Substantive code review history - examples of catching architectural issues
• Active daily use of AI coding agents (Claude Code, Copilot, Cursor, or similar) with a clear point of view on where they help, where they hurt, and how to keep their output reviewable
• Comfort with production debugging across the stack: traces, logs, profiling, the unglamorous parts
• Strong async written communication: clear PR descriptions, sharp Slack, sharp specs
• Experience extending or building on agentic developer tooling (custom agents, skills, hooks, MCP servers, eval harnesses)
• Background in rich text editing, document collaboration, or LLM-backed product features