Sr Software Engineer, Backend

McGraw Hill delivers digital learning solutions that empower educators and learners through intuitive, engaging platforms. The Senior Backend Software Engineer will build and operate services powering AI-driven learning experiences and digital courseware, while leading complex initiatives, influencing architecture, and coordinating shared-service integrations across engineering teams.

Responsibilities:

• Design, develop, test, and operate scalable backend services using both TypeScript and Go
• Own services through their full lifecycle, including architecture, delivery, production readiness, operational health, incident response, and continuous improvement
• Build and evolve GraphQL and REST APIs, schemas, resolvers, and service contracts with attention to backward compatibility, versioning, schema management, and safe migrations
• Design and develop distributed systems and independently deployable microservices
• Build event producers and consumers using queues, topics, workers, and asynchronous processing
• Develop, deploy, and operate services on Kubernetes and Amazon EKS
• Work with AWS services such as DynamoDB, Aurora/RDS, S3, SQS, SNS, Secrets Manager, and ECR
• Design data models, schemas, indexes, migrations, and persistence strategies across relational, NoSQL, and graph databases
• Partner with multiple engineering teams to plan and deliver shared-service integrations, align technical contracts, and coordinate dependencies
• Contribute to a cross-team delivery model by communicating implementation details, managing integration risks, and supporting end-to-end delivery
• Improve reliability through automated testing, observability, tracing, logging, alerting, and performance tuning. Use observability platforms such as New Relic to monitor system health, troubleshoot production issues, and improve service performance
• Participate in architecture discussions, code reviews, technical planning, and production support
• Mentor engineers and follow security, compliance, auditability, and change-management practices

Requirements:

• • Passion for using technology to improve educational outcomes
• • Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or a related field, or equivalent experience
• • 8+ years of professional software development experience, including significant experience building and operating production backend services
• • Strong professional experience developing backend services in both TypeScript and Go
• • Strong experience with microservices, distributed systems, and service-oriented architectures
• • Experience designing GraphQL and REST APIs
• • Experience building and operating event producers and consumers, including queues, topics, retries, and failure handling
• • Hands-on experience with AWS and Kubernetes, preferably Amazon EKS
• • Strong understanding of data modeling and databases such as MySQL/Aurora, DynamoDB, Redis, or graph databases. Experience delivering shared-service integrations across multiple teams or products
• • Experience with observability, monitoring, distributed tracing, centralized logging, and platforms such as New Relic. Demonstrated ability to lead complex initiatives, influence architecture, manage dependencies, and mentor engineers. Experience with CI/CD, production operations, automated testing, and performance optimization
• • Strong communication, collaboration, and problem-solving skills
• • Experience in EdTech or digital learning platforms
• • Experience with GraphQL federation, gqlgen, Apollo Server, Prisma, sqlc, Gremlin, or Amazon Neptune
• • AWS Certification
• • Experience building AI/ML-enabled backend services
• • Familiarity with Terraform, Helm, GitHub Actions, and infrastructure automation
• • Experience with OpenTelemetry, Sentry, Datadog, or similar observability tools
• • Experience designing high-volume learning, engagement, analytics, or event-processing systems
• • Experience in a SOX- and/or SOC 2-compliant environment is preferred