The Role

At GoGuardian, we're expanding our mission of helping every student learn, thrive, and feel safe. We're building a new generation of school safety products that help schools respond faster, operate more effectively, and create safer learning environments for millions of students and educators.

As a Staff Software Engineer, you'll be an early technical leader helping define and build category-defining products where software, hardware, and real-world operational reliability intersect. This is a rare opportunity to work on 0-to-1 products that directly impact student safety while solving complex engineering challenges across cloud platforms, real-time systems, device integrations, and large-scale distributed architectures.

The systems you'll build are integration-heavy, compliance-aware, and highly reliable. They must function in real-world school environments where timely information, operational resilience, and ease of use matter. You'll partner closely with Product, Design, Principal Engineers, and cross-functional stakeholders to shape technical strategy, establish engineering foundations, and deliver products trusted by schools every day. You'll work closely with principal architects to execute on technical strategy and ship v1 products that real institutions trust with safety-critical workflows.

If you're energized by ambiguous problems, building new products from the ground up, and creating technology that delivers meaningful impact for students and educators, we'd love to talk with you.

Why This Role Matters

Every day, schools depend on technology to help protect students, support educators, and respond effectively when situations arise. The products built by this team will be used in real-world environments where reliability, usability, and trust are essential.

This is an opportunity to work on technically challenging problems at the intersection of software, hardware, distributed systems, and operational reliability while building products that have a meaningful and lasting impact on students, educators, and school communities.

The engineers who join this team will help define the foundation of an entirely new product area at GoGuardian and shape how schools leverage technology to create safer learning environments for years to come.

What You'll Do

• Lead architecture, technical design, and implementation of new school safety products from concept through production.
• Drive technical strategy and engineering excellence across multiple teams and systems.
• Design scalable, secure, and resilient distributed systems that operate reliably in real-world environments.
• Build and maintain integrations with third-party platforms, identity providers, communication systems, hardware devices, and external data sources.
• Collaborate closely with Product, Design, and Engineering leaders to translate customer needs into practical technical solutions.
• Mentor engineers, raise engineering standards, and help shape the technical culture of a growing organization.
• Make thoughtful technology decisions that balance customer impact, operational complexity, speed of execution, and long-term maintainability.

Who You Are

• 8+ years of experience building and operating production software systems.
• Proven track record of owning and delivering complex backend or full-stack systems end-to-end.
• Strong experience designing distributed systems, APIs, event-driven architectures, and cloud-native applications.
• Experience building integration-heavy platforms involving third-party APIs, webhooks, data synchronization, and identity systems (OAuth, SAML, SSO).
• Strong software engineering fundamentals including system design, data modeling, observability, reliability, performance, and security.
• Experience handling sensitive data and building systems where privacy, security, and compliance are architectural requirements.
• Demonstrated success delivering 0-to-1 products or major platform initiatives in environments with significant ambiguity.
• Proven ability to influence technical direction, mentor engineers, and lead through collaboration rather than authority.

Domain Experience We Value (Bonus if You Have It)

We recognize that exceptional engineers often bring deep expertise in one domain rather than every area listed below.
Candidates are not expected to have experience across all of the areas listed below. We welcome engineers from a variety of backgrounds who have built complex systems operating at the intersection of software, devices, and real-world operations.

Experience in one or more of the following areas is valuable:

• Real-time, high-reliability, or operationally critical systems.
• Distributed, event-driven, or edge-to-cloud architectures.
• IoT platforms, connected devices, device fleet management, or hardware integrations.
• Software platforms that interact with physical devices, kiosks, peripherals, sensors, or other endpoint technologies.
• Physical security, operational technology, critical infrastructure, or other environments where reliability and resilience are essential.
• Large-scale distributed systems that integrate with numerous third-party platforms and external systems.