About this Staff Software Engineer role at GiveCampus
GiveCampus is the world's leading fundraising platform for non-profit educational institutions. Trusted by millions of donors and 1,300+ colleges, universities, and K-12 schools, our mission is to help advance the quality, the affordability, and the accessibility of education. At our current pace, we will facilitate $100 billion in charitable giving over the next decade–enough money to send more than 1 million students to college, tuition-free.
GiveCampus is backed by leading investors including Y Combinator, but we’re also practitioners of Sustainable Growth: we’ve made the Inc. 5000 list of America's fastest-growing private companies each of the last five years and we’ve been profitable nine of the last 10. In 2025, we celebrated a $140 million growth investment that included a major liquidity event for GiveCampus employees–the second in less than three years.
Our purpose-driven team of 130+ is located in 30+ states across the US: team members work from anywhere they choose. We have a beautiful 12,000sf office in Washington, DC that is available for people to use whenever they want, and we regularly organize team meet-ups, visit partner institutions, and host retreats in various locations.
While we operate at meaningful scale, we’re still small relative to the commercial and social good opportunities in front of us. Every GiveCampus employee plays a meaningful role in shaping what comes next, and we're growing the team in support of our ambitious plans–including a $100 million investment in AI product development. If you believe in the transformative power of education and want to join a fast-growing, mission-driven company, you’ll fit right in.
Location: This is a remote-first role based in the U.S. While we embrace flexible, distributed work, we also value in-person connection. Team members are expected to attend multiple company-wide and team-specific onsites throughout the year.
We are looking for a brilliant and energetic Staff Software Engineer to help shape the technical future of GiveCampus. This is our most senior individual-contributor Engineering role, and your influence will reach across all of Engineering and the company as a whole. You will set architectural direction, guide our hardest technical decisions, and raise the bar for the entire team through mentorship and by example. You will partner with Engineers, Product, and our Partners to solve the kinds of problems that shape a platform's next five years. If you love going deep on architecture, lifting up the people around you, and owning the toughest challenges end to end, we'd love to talk.
Responsibilities will include:
- Setting and evolving the architectural direction of the platform, leading the design of complex, cross-pod systems from UI to backend services to database performance.
- Setting the bar for code quality, system design, and architecture across Engineering, so our solutions are scalable, reliable, and secure by default.
- Serving as a technical thought leader and advisor across pods, helping other teams resolve their toughest challenges and guiding long-term technical planning.
- Partnering with Product and design leads to shape technical strategy, assess feasibility, and provide estimates for our most complex and innovative initiatives.
- Mentoring engineers at every level and running "level-up" initiatives that grow the team's craft through PR standards, design reviews, and shared learning.
- Championing security, performance, and observability: solving the hardest issues and pushing us to improve our practices, not just meet them.
- Weighing in on complex incident response and owning accountability for the reliability of the systems you shepherd.
- Leading technical conversations with Partner institutions on complex integration, performance, or security challenges to unblock their success.
- Contributing to the recruitment and onboarding of new team members, helping build a diverse and talented Engineering team.
- Participating in the support of the platform on a rotational basis (pod-based support and paired 24/7 on-call rotation).
What we are looking for:
- Extensive, real-world full-stack experience in Ruby, Python, or JavaScript/Node.js, with deep expertise in at least one.
- A track record of setting architectural direction: designing scalable, resilient systems that can be delivered incrementally while keeping an eye toward scale.
- A history of shipping code that has supported tens of thousands of users, including enterprise/business customers (Enterprise SaaS)
- Proficiency with MVC frameworks such as Rails or Django.
- Strong front-end and back-end skills, including modern front-end frameworks like React and Vue.js.
- Deep SQL database experience (PostgreSQL, MySQL, Oracle) and experience deploying to AWS, Heroku, or similar.
- Demonstrated technical leadership and mentorship that has measurably grown other engineers.
- The ability to influence beyond your own team, building trust and alignment with Engineers, Product, Partner Support and Partners (aka Customers).
- The judgment to balance swift delivery with long-term maintainability and planning for scale.
- 12+ years of hands-on development experience, with a significant portion spent as a technical leader, mentor, or architect.
Bonus points if you have:
- Expert-level knowledge of Ruby/Ruby on Rails and RSpec.
- Experience with Postgres database administration.
- Operations experience as it pertains to site reliability and speed.
- Familiarity with networking, caching, and databases, and how to triage performance and stability issues.
- Experience defining engineering standards, security practices, or observability across an organization.
- Experience working on a fundraising/crowdfunding, fintech, or payments technology product.
- A good eye for intuitive, user-friendly front-end design.
- Experience representing engineering externally through talks, writing, or industry communities
Ready to apply?
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At GiveCampus, we value diversity and we pledge to foster an environment of support, inclusivity, and learning, both on the job and throughout the application process. In this spirit, we encourage candidates of all backgrounds to apply.
GiveCampus is an Equal Opportunity Employer. Applicants and employees are not discriminated against because of race, color, creed, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, age, religion, national origin, citizenship status, disability, ancestry, marital status, veteran status, medical condition or any protected category prohibited by local, state or federal laws.
If you feel like you don't meet all of the requirements for this role, please apply anyways. We know confidence gaps and imposter syndrome often get in the way of connecting with incredible people, and we don't want them to prevent us from meeting you.
