Air Reading | Product & Engineering
Location: Remote within the United States.
We are especially interested in candidates based in the San Francisco Bay Area, Seattle, the New York City metro area, Austin, Denver, or Irvine.
Base salary: $130,000–$200,000 annually
Air Reading helps students become confident readers through live, small-group online instruction. Our software supports the full learning experience: students joining class, teachers delivering lessons, schools tracking progress, and teams coordinating the work behind each session.
We’re looking for a Senior Software Engineer who combines strong engineering judgment with curiosity about how children learn and teachers work.
Why this role
This role is central to Air Reading’s ability to deliver high-quality instruction as we grow. You’ll work with a globally distributed product and engineering team on problems that shape each class, from student placement and dependable teacher tools to clear progress reporting for schools. You’ll build and operate production software while helping shape product decisions. Working closely with product, design, teachers, and school teams, you’ll identify problems, develop solutions, and learn from the results.
What you’ll do
- Map student, teacher, and admin workflows with product and design, then turn the problems you find into scoped engineering work.
- Build and ship changes to student placement, scheduling, teacher tools, and school reporting across the interface, API, and database.
- Speak with teachers, operations staff, and other people using and supporting our product. Use their feedback and product data to define problems, shape priorities, and test your ideas.
- Build clear, reliable features across our React and TypeScript client and TypeScript API.
- Make thoughtful tradeoffs among speed, usability, reliability, and maintainability, especially when a class is about to start or student information is involved.
- Assess whether shipped work improves the classroom experience, supports student learning, or saves time for teachers and staff, then refine it.
- Use production data, logs, and alerts to find problems, improve reliability, and learn how features perform after release.
- Work on a small engineering team where you’ll review code, share technical decisions, and help teammates solve production problems.
- Projects may include improving assessments and student placement, helping teachers run effective classes, giving schools useful insight into student progress, and reducing manual work in scheduling and support.
What you bring
- 5 + years of experience building and operating production web applications. We value the scope and impact of your work more than a strict year count. A computer science degree is welcome, but equivalent experience and demonstrated engineering ability are just as valuable.
- Strong TypeScript and web development skills. We use React on the client and Node.js, Express, Prisma, and PostgreSQL on the server. Experience with similar tools is welcome.
- Product judgment grounded in curiosity about users. You can uncover problems in a full workflow, help set priorities, and use feedback and data to improve the experience.
- Clear communication and a collaborative approach with teammates across engineering, product, and design.
- Thoughtful attention to accessibility, privacy, and reliability in software used by children and schools.
- A willingness to mentor other engineers while staying close to the code.
- Experience owning software in production, including its reliability. Our infrastructure runs on AWS, including ECS Fargate, Aurora PostgreSQL, S3, and CloudFront. We use Datadog and Sentry for observability and LaunchDarkly for feature releases; familiarity with every tool is not required.
How we work
Air Reading’s values start with Student First. We act with care for students, teachers, and teammates; work openly as one team; use evidence to guide decisions; and keep learning and improving. We value people who take action, own mistakes, and celebrate progress together.