Lead Engineer I

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

The Software Engineering team is a group of full stack developers who design, develop, and maintain our products, tools, and infrastructure.

Your day-to-day job will consist of:

• Provide technical leadership for a cross-functional team delivering customer-facing product features and cloud-based services.
• Define and evolve frontend, backend, API, and cloud architecture for systems of moderate to high complexity.
• Lead technical design discussions, review proposals, and guide architectural and implementation tradeoffs.
• Write, review, and guide the implementation of TypeScript, React, Node.js, API, and infrastructure code.
• Establish engineering patterns and standards for component architecture, state management, API integration, testing, accessibility, internationalization, security, performance, and error handling.
• Guide the design of backend and backend-for-frontend APIs that integrate with cloud services, data stores, and internal platforms.
• Partner with product, design, DevOps, platform, security, and architecture teams on technical planning, infrastructure as code, CI/CD, deployment automation, and operational readiness.
• Mentor engineers, address technical debt and delivery risks, and support production issue resolution, root-cause analysis, and improvements to system reliability.

Minimum Qualifications

• Minimum of 10+ years of relevant and related work experience.
• Bachelor’s degree or equivalent, or equivalent years of relevant work experience.
• Significant experience building and operating production web applications using TypeScript and modern JavaScript tooling.
• Strong experience with React application architecture, including component design, state management, API integration, testing, and performance considerations.
• Experience designing or leading backend API development in Node.js or a comparable server-side platform.
• Familiarity with cloud-native architecture, especially serverless or managed-service environments.
• Experience with infrastructure as code, CI/CD pipelines, deployment automation, and environment-based configuration.
• Strong testing discipline, including unit tests, component tests, API tests, mocking strategies, and practical coverage expectations.
• Ability to lead technical design across frontend, backend, and infrastructure concerns.
• Experience mentoring engineers and raising the quality of a team’s technical work.
• Strong code review skills and the ability to explain architectural decisions clearly.
• Understanding of secure engineering practices, including safe logging, input validation, error handling, dependency management, and protection of sensitive data.
• Ability to collaborate effectively with product, design, platform, security, and engineering stakeholders.
• Proven ability to balance delivery speed with long-term maintainability.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with micro-frontends, Module Federation, or modular frontend architectures.
• Experience with Redux Toolkit, RTK Query, or similar client-side data/state management approaches.
• Experience with AWS services such as Lambda, API Gateway, DynamoDB, SQS, SSM, CloudFront, or related managed services.
• Experience with AWS CDK or another infrastructure-as-code framework.
• Experience building backend-for-frontend APIs for complex product experiences.
• Familiarity with enterprise design systems and accessibility standards such as WCAG 2.1 AA.
• Experience with observability, structured logging, tracing, and operational readiness for production systems.
• Experience improving frontend performance, Core Web Vitals, or user-experience quality metrics.
• Experience working in a monorepo with multiple deployable workspaces or packages.
• Experience guiding teams through dependency upgrades, platform migrations, or modernization efforts.

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.