Upbeat Software Engineer

About Upbeat Upbeat works with K-12 districts across the country to administer a research-grounded survey to elevate teacher engagement and retention by fostering strong school environments. Founded and led by former educators, we bring together data scientists, technologists, and experienced former school leaders to deliver a research-backed solution. Our surveys paired with tailored toolkits and intervention strategies surface real-time insights so that principals and district leaders are able to better understand and uncover the conditions affecting employee morale and establish actionable plans to improve teacher and staff retention. Role and Responsibilities Upbeat seeks a Software Engineer to be a key member of the engineering team. This is a hands-on, junior-to-mid level role that partners directly with our Chief Technology Officer on the full spectrum of our day-to-day work: writing real production code across our application stack, supporting AWS infrastructure, preparing evidence for our annual SOC 2 audits and NIST CSF compliance requirements, and serving as the first line of triage when any team member runs into a bug or technical question. You will be detail-oriented, comfortable shipping code under review, and energized by working across many surfaces of the business rather than going deep in a single product silo. Job Responsibilities Develop and maintain features across our Angular and React web applications and Node.js (TypeScript) and Python Lambda backends, including our engagement survey platform, reports application, and internal admin portals Operate and improve our AWS infrastructure (Lambda, API Gateway, S3, CloudFront, CloudFormation, CodePipeline, IAM, RDS/Aurora) under the supervision of the CTO Drive day-to-day audit preparation work in SecureFrame: pulling evidence, attaching artifacts to SOC 2 Type II and NIST CSF 2.0 controls, reconciling failing tests, and maintaining the localized framework requirements documentation Triage and resolve bugs and ad-hoc technical requests escalated from across the Upbeat team — survey administrators, program managers, coaches, and operations — typically through Jira and Slack Pair with the CTO on cross-cutting initiatives: incident response, security findings remediation, vendor risk reviews, dependency upgrades, and infrastructure refactors Contribute to internal documentation, runbooks, and engineering conventions so that institutional knowledge is captured rather than locked in any individual's head Participate in code review and the broader engineering ceremonies (standups, planning, retrospectives) Help maintain and improve our AI-assisted development workflows responsibly — using tools like Claude and Copilot to accelerate work without sacrificing code quality or understanding Qualifications At least 2–4 years of hands-on professional software engineering experience writing and shipping production code (this is not a role for candidates whose primary experience is prompting AI tools — we are looking for engineers who can read, write, and reason about code themselves) Working familiarity with at least one mainstream backend runtime (Node or Python preferred) and one modern frontend framework (Angular, React, or Vue) Practical AWS experience: comfortable navigating the console and CLI, deploying and debugging Lambda functions, reading CloudWatch logs, working with IAM policies, and reasoning about service interactions Strong written and verbal communication — much of this role is asynchronous troubleshooting via Slack, Jira tickets, and pull request review Demonstrated comfort with ambiguity, flexibility, and resilience; ability to context-switch between feature work, infra, audit prep, and team support without dropping balls Experience with or genuine interest in compliance frameworks (SOC 2, NIST CSF, ISO 27001) and the day-to-day discipline of maintaining audit evidence Tech savvy and fluent in the tooling required for a remote work environment, including Zoom, Google Workspace, Jira, Confluence, GitHub, and Slack Interested in MCP servers and other emerging developer-AI integrations as part of daily work Bachelor's degree in computer science, a related field, any of the liberal arts, or equivalent professional experience Prior experience at a small SaaS or edtech company (requested but not required) Prior experience supporting a SOC 2 audit cycle (requested but not required) Prior experience as a coach, instructor, or leader in a formal or informal educational context (requested but not required) Salary Range: $100,000-110,000 As a part of your application, please fill out this google form to be considered for the role: https://forms.gle/xQTxzJA4UvHSXv9t6