Staff Platform Engineer

Job Description

Our Mission and Opportunity Early education is one of the greatest determinants of childhood outcomes, is a must for working families, and has a lasting social and economic impact. Brightwheel’s vision is to enable high quality early education for every child — by giving teachers meaningfully more time with students each day, engaging parents in the development of their kids, and supporting the small businesses that make up the backbone of the $175 billion early education market. Brightwheel is the most loved technology brand in early education globally, trusted by thousands of educators and millions of families. Our Team We are a fully remote team with employees across every time zone in the US. Our team is passionate, talented, and customer-focused. Our exceptional investor group includes Addition, Bessemer Venture Partners, Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, GGV Capital, Lowercase Capital, Emerson Collective, and Mark Cuban. We believe that everyone—from our employees to the students, teachers, and administrators we serve— should be given the opportunity to learn and thrive, whatever their background may be. We celebrate diversity in all forms because it allows our team and the communities we serve to reach their full potential and do their best work. Our Culture We challenge ourselves every day to improve quality of life—from our employees to the students, teachers, and administrators we serve. We care deeply about how our work enriches our customers now and scales for the future. We are owners and see our work through. We are growth-minded, we iterate, and we seek to continuously improve. We are pragmatic, and we root decisions in data, logic, and intuition. Yet we value speed and a strong bias for action. We lean into collaboration, assume the best from everyone, and welcome differing opinions. We have audacious goals with a can-do attitude, break down walls to get stuff done, and are resourceful in order to accomplish more with less. Who You Are Brightwheel is seeking an experienced platform engineer to join the platform engineering team. You should be someone who is able to wear many hats while focusing on tasks that derive the most value for our customers and the business. A successful platform engineer at Brightwheel is someone that is able to partner across the organization to fully understand the platform needs of the business and is able to prioritize their work accordingly. This person should also have the ability to quickly pick up new technologies, implement them, document the implementation, and then disseminate their knowledge to the engineering team. Every engineer at Brightwheel is afforded a high degree of ownership and autonomy. We are a lean, fast-moving team and value individuals who can optimize for being impactful while considering both technical and business drivers.

What You'll Do

• Enable a large number of engineering teams to operate independently/autonomously, move fast in delivering reliable systems to customers towards the company vision, and limit the blast radius of their changes
• Develop GitOps tooling to enable product engineers to incorporate new technologies and make them available to use in their technology stacks
• Develop a fully automated observability stack based on the existing SaaS system, and extend it to predict capacity needs based on the usage patterns
• Scale our shared data infrastructure to meet to growth demands and ensure capacity utilization efficiency and reliability of our infrastructure for our customers
• Implement security controls and best practices to safeguard our environments and our customers
• Collaborate with product and engineering teams effectively and with empathy; promote technical learning across teams
• Be a steward of quality, scalability, security, and performance. You'll work with other engineers to ensure that we have a solid foundation that serves our customers, and enables the team to continue building a great product
• Mentor and advocate for junior engineers; push the boundary of their comfort zone. Build trust and respect in the team; set good examples for others
• Interview and evaluate engineering candidate technical capabilities to help grow our engineering team

Qualifications: Technical Skills

• You have 6+ years of professional experience, preferably in dynamic companies/teams
• You have experience defining technical strategy and architecture to solve complex technical problems and have demonstrated delivering solutions with limited guidance
• You have strong programming fundamentals, ideally in a variety of languages like Ruby, JavaScript, Python, or Node
• You’re experienced with scaling and shipping complex, distributed applications in AWS or equivalent
• You have experience with incident response and management tools like PagerDuty
You must have experience in at least four of the following areas:
• You have proficiency in both contributing to and designing CI/CD pipelines
• You’re experienced shipping complex services using infrastructure as code
• You’re an expert at measuring query latencies, resource allocation and management
• You have wide understanding of system and application architectures, and have a strong observability background
• You have experience deploying to and orchestrating containers (Docker, Kubernetes, etc.)

Qualifications: Essential People Skills

• You have experience collaborating effectively cross team to influence software architecture and technology priorities towards a business goal
• You focus on clear and concise communication because you understand it’s the biggest responsibility of your job as an engineer
• You make pragmatic technology choices at work and are hungry to learn
• You care deeply about your work and are aware of how your attitude affects those around you; it’s obvious you’re having fun with your work and peers
• You experiment with many different types of development and project methodologies and have a healthy appreciation for what works; you drive engineering process and culture improvements
• You love to teach and learn from your peers

Brightwheel is committed to internal pay equity and offers a competitive compensation package, including base salary, equity, and benefits. Our benefits package includes premium medical, dental, and vision benefits, generous paid parental leave, a flexible paid time off policy, a monthly wellness and productivity stipend, and a Learning & Development stipend. For cash compensation, brightwheel sets standard ranges for all roles based on function, level, and geographic location, benchmarked against similar-stage growth companies. In alignment with Colorado’s Equal Pay for Equal Work Act, the annual cash compensation for this role in Colorado is targeted at $170,000-$212,000. In alignment with the New York State Senate Bill S9427A and California State Senate Bill No. 1162, the annual cash compensation for this role in California and New York City is targeted at $200,000-$235,000. In alignment with Washington’s Equal Pay and Opportunities Act, the annual cash compensation for this role in Washington is targeted at $170,000-$235,000. Multiple factors, including geographic location, candidate experience, and expertise, determine final offer amounts. If you are applying from a different location and have questions about the compensation band for your region, please ask your recruiter. Brightwheel is committed to creating a diverse and inclusive work environment and is an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, gender, gender identity, gender expression, sexual orientation, national origin, genetics, disability, age, or veteran status. Apply for this job