Founding Senior Software Engineer, Developer Experience & AI Platform team

Job description

ClassDojo's goal is to give every child on Earth an education they love. We started by building a powerful network for communication. ClassDojo’s flagship app is the #1 communication app connecting K-12 teachers, children, and families globally. Teachers use it to share what’s happening throughout the day through photos, videos, and messages that make parents feel like they’re there. It’s actively used in over 95% of US schools, reaching over 45 million children in 180 countries, with a team of just around 200 people [1]. We are now beginning to use this network to give kids the best learning experiences in the world, far beyond those a standard school can provide. We hire for talent density. Our team comprises the most talented, entrepreneurial, and innovative teammates from around the world, with experience in education and large scale consumer internet companies, including Instagram, Netflix, Dropbox, Stripe, Uber, Y Combinator, and more. We’re building a company where the most talented people want to work. We believe you’ll do the best work of your life here—and you’ll pioneer the future of education, too. **About the Role:** Every feature ClassDojo ships begins with an engineer. Every minute an engineer spends waiting on builds, troubleshooting local environments, repeating manual workflows, or navigating unnecessary complexity is a minute they aren't building magical experiences for children, teachers, and families. Developer Experience Engineering exists to remove that friction. As a **Senior Software Engineer, Developer Experience,** you'll build the tools, workflows, and AI-powered developer experiences that make every engineer at ClassDojo more effective. This is a unique opportunity to join a newly formed Developer Experience Engineering team and help define what great developer experience looks like at ClassDojo. Rather than inheriting a mature platform, you'll help shape its foundations—partnering closely with engineers across the company to identify opportunities, build high-leverage solutions, and establish trusted paved paths that make shipping software faster, safer, and more enjoyable. We're looking for someone who combines exceptional software engineering with product thinking. You'll treat engineers as customers, build products they'll genuinely enjoy using, and focus relentlessly on creating leverage across the engineering organization. **What You’ll Do:** - **Build products for engineers:** Design and build internal platforms, tooling, and developer workflows that improve the experience of developing, testing, reviewing, deploying, and operating software. - **Multiply engineering productivity**: Identify opportunities where thoughtful platform investments create outsized impact across the engineering organization. Continuously reduce developer friction while improving engineering velocity, quality, and reliability. - **Help shape AI-native software development:** Build practical AI-powered workflows that help engineers write, review, test, and ship software more effectively. Evaluate emerging technologies thoughtfully and help establish patterns that improve outcomes while maintaining security, reliability, and engineering quality. - **Partner deeply across engineering**: Work closely with product engineering, infrastructure, security, and technical leaders to understand pain points, prioritize opportunities, and build platform capabilities that solve real problems. - **Create trusted paved paths**: Build reusable tools, automation, documentation, and self-service capabilities that become the preferred way engineers work because they're intuitive, reliable, and genuinely useful. - **Measure impact**: Use engineering metrics, developer feedback, and adoption data to continuously improve the developer experience. Focus on meaningful outcomes rather than activity metrics. - **Help build Developer Experience Engineering**: As an early member of the team, contribute to technical direction, engineering standards, and the long-term evolution of Developer Experience Engineering at ClassDojo. **You’ll Be A Match If You:** - Have extensive experience (7-10+ years) building production software in modern engineering organizations. - Enjoy solving organization-wide engineering problems rather than only product-specific challenges. - Think like a product engineer even when building internal platforms. - Demonstrate strong technical judgment and know when to build, simplify, automate, or adopt existing solutions. - Thrive in ambiguity and are excited by the opportunity to help build a new Platform Engineering team. - Build trust through partnership and influence rather than organizational authority. - Care deeply about engineering craftsmanship, maintainability, and long-term platform health. - Approach AI as a practical tool for improving engineering effectiveness rather than an end in itself. - Measure success through the impact your work has on other engineers. **Nice to Have Experiences:** - Developer Experience or Platform Engineering teams. - Internal developer platforms or engineering productivity initiatives. - CI/CD, release engineering, developer environments, or software delivery systems. - AI-assisted software development or developer tooling. - Engineering productivity measurement frameworks such as DORA or SPACE. - High-growth engineering organizations where platform investments had organization-wide impact. Developer Experience Engineering is a force multiplier for the entire organization. Every improvement you make has the potential to help engineers build better software, move faster with greater confidence, and spend more of their time focused on creating meaningful experiences for children, teachers, and families. If you're energized by solving hard technical problems, building products for engineers, and creating systems that make everyone around you more effective, we'd love to meet you. [1] Some more context: *(If you are on LinkedIn, you will not be able to access the hyperlinks below. Once you click apply, you will be directed to our career website (if you are not on there already) and will be able to access the hyperlinks)* - [How ClassDojo Connects Parents, Students, and Teachers](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7XBnlzHpXTQ) - “[Whats New on ClassDojo 2023](https://youtu.be/O8Tora5T7O4)” - [TechCrunch Article: Second Act comes with First Profits](https://techcrunch.com/2021/01/26/classdojos-second-act-comes-with-first-profits/) Click [here](https://www.classdojo.com/press/) if you're interested in learning more about what we've been up to. We are committed to equal employment opportunity regardless of race, color, ancestry, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, age, citizenship, marital status, disability, gender identity or Veteran status. In accordance with the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, we will consider for employment qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records. We are happy to accommodate any disabilities or special needs. We are a distributed company, so we hire regardless of location, as long as you are willing to have significant hours overlap with one of the Americas time zones. ClassDojo takes a number of factors into consideration when determining compensation, including geographic location, experience, and skillset. Salary ranges (United States): - CA, WA, NY, NJ, CT states: $171,500 - $250,000 (USD) - All other states in the US: $146,000 - $215,000 (USD) #LI-Remote