Senior Software Engineer

The Modern Classrooms Project (MCP) is a nonprofit organization focused on empowering educators to enhance classroom experiences. They are seeking a Senior Software Engineer to lead the development of AI-driven educational technology products, collaborating with a small team to create impactful tools for teachers and students.

Responsibilities:

• 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 backend 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

Requirements:

• 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 (GitHub Spec Kit or equivalent) 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
• You have 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
• You have built real backend 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
• 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 motivated by MCP's mission and vision, and eager to build teacher- and student-facing products
• 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
• 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)