Lead Engineer II

About PowerSchool

At PowerSchool, we power education for students around the world. As the global leader in cloud-based K-12 software, we support the full education ecosystem—from the central office to the classroom to the home. Joining PowerSchool means being part of a mission-driven team that is transforming K-12 education by helping schools operate more effectively and deliver better outcomes for educators, students, and families.

Team Overview

Our Research & Development (R&D) team is the technical talent at the heart of our product suite, overseeing the product development lifecycle from concept to delivery. From engineering to quality assurance to data science, the R&D team ensures our customers seamlessly use our products and can depend on their consistency.

Description

We are looking for a Lead Engineer to provide technical leadership for teams building modern enterprise applications, APIs, microservices, data-processing systems, integrations, and cloud infrastructure.

This is a hands-on technical leadership role spanning modern and legacy systems built with TypeScript, JavaScript, Java, frontend frameworks, backend services, Kubernetes, and infrastructure as code. You will guide architecture and modernization, contribute to critical implementations, mentor engineers, and improve the reliability, security, and maintainability of the systems you support.

You may work across different products, shared services, or platform capabilities based on evolving business and engineering priorities.

Key Responsibilities

• Provide technical leadership for cross-functional teams delivering customer-facing applications, APIs, services, and cloud-based capabilities.
• Define and evolve frontend, backend, integration, data-processing, and cloud architecture for systems of moderate to high complexity.
• Lead technical design discussions, review proposals, document architectural decisions, and guide implementation tradeoffs.
• Design, implement, review, test, and troubleshoot production software across Java, TypeScript, JavaScript, frontend, and backend systems.
• Establish engineering patterns and standards for API design, testing, security, accessibility, configuration, observability, performance, and release quality.
• Partner with product, design, architecture, security, DevOps/SRE, quality engineering, and platform teams to translate business goals into incremental technical plans.
• Identify technical debt, reliability risks, dependencies, and delivery bottlenecks, and guide modernization without disrupting ongoing product delivery.
• Mentor engineers through design reviews, code reviews, pairing, debugging, technical planning, delegated ownership, and implementation support.

Minimum Qualifications

• Minimum of 10 years of professional software engineering experience, including leadership of complex initiatives involving multiple services, repositories, teams, or stakeholders.
• Strong hands-on expertise in either:
  • Java and its backend ecosystem, or
  • TypeScript/JavaScript with Node.js and modern frontend frameworks.
• Ability to review, troubleshoot, and provide architectural guidance across frontend and backend systems, including technologies outside your primary area of expertise.
• Experience designing and operating production-grade distributed systems using APIs, microservices, asynchronous processing, databases, integrations, and cloud-hosted services.
• Experience with cloud-native architecture, containers, Kubernetes, serverless technologies, or managed cloud services.
• Experience with infrastructure as code, CI/CD pipelines, deployment automation, environment configuration, and production release practices.
• Strong understanding of automated testing, secure engineering, code review, observability, incident response, and operational readiness.
• Demonstrated ability to mentor engineers, communicate technical decisions clearly, collaborate across functions, and balance delivery priorities with long-term maintainability.
• Proven ability to balance delivery speed with long-term maintainability.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with React, Angular, NestJS, micro-frontends, Module Federation, or other modular application architectures.
• Experience with Redux Toolkit, RTK Query, or comparable client-side state and data-management approaches.
• Experience building backend-for-frontend APIs for complex product experiences.
• Experience with AWS services such as Lambda, API Gateway, DynamoDB, SQS, SSM, and CloudFront.
• Experience with Terraform, AWS CDK, CloudFormation, Kubernetes manifests, or comparable infrastructure-as-code frameworks.
• Experience with multi-tenant SaaS applications, OAuth, role-based access control, API gateways, and protection of sensitive data.
• Experience with structured logging, distributed tracing, service-level metrics, frontend performance, or Core Web Vitals.
• Experience with content ingestion, search and indexing, metadata, media processing, data pipelines, or enterprise system integrations.
• Experience working across monorepos or multiple deployable repositories and guiding dependency upgrades, platform migrations, repository consolidation, or legacy-system modernization.
• Familiarity with enterprise design systems, accessibility standards such as WCAG 2.1 AA, and responsible use of AI-assisted engineering tools.

EEO Commitment

PowerSchool is committed to a diverse and inclusive workplace. PowerSchool is an equal opportunity employer and does not discriminate on the basis of race, national origin, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, protected veteran status, disability, age, or other legally protected status. Our inclusive culture empowers PowerSchoolers to deliver the best results for our customers. We not only celebrate the diversity of our workforce, we celebrate the diverse ways we work. If you have a disability and need an accommodation regarding our recruiting process, please let us know by emailing accomodations@powerschool.com.