[Hiring] Senior Software Engineer @Finalsite

Role Description

Finalsite is the preferred website, communications, enrollment, and marketing platform of more than 7,000 schools and school districts in 119 countries around the world. The company’s people, products and services transform how schools connect and engage with their community, recruit students and staff, and fundraise; while managing the complex requirements around data privacy, accessibility, hosting and security.

When a school goes into lockdown, closes for a storm, or needs to reach every family before the buses leave, the message goes through Finalsite. Our communications platform carries emergency alerts, district notifications, and everyday parent communication for thousands of schools and districts. The traffic is not smooth, and the platform can need to deliver a single message to hundreds of thousands of recipients within minutes.

This is a role for an engineer who wants to own their work all the way into production. At Finalsite, engineering owns the how and the when: technical design, estimates, the quality and operability of what ships, and the call on whether a release is ready.

The position is based in India, joining six engineers already on this team here and working with colleagues in the United States and Poland. The team spans time zones, so writing things down, keeping decisions visible, and getting yourself unblocked matter more here than they would on a team sitting in one room.

Key Responsibilities

• Own one or more significant services in the messaging path end to end, covering design, implementation, automated tests, monitoring, and behavior in production.
• Take areas that are fragile or thinly understood and leave them better by adding coverage, expanding observability, retiring debt, and writing down what previously lived only in someone's head.
• Make delivery observable, so the team can quickly answer what was sent, what arrived, what did not, and why.
• Contribute to modernization in ways that survive contact with the existing system, favoring incremental migration, coexistence periods, and rollback paths over a parallel rewrite.
• Bring SRE in at design time rather than deploy time, and build on the tooling they provide.
• Be dependable during incidents in your areas. Jump in without waiting to be asked, and turn each incident into a test, an alert, or a fix that makes the next one smaller.
• Estimate your work and communicate technical and schedule risk early, flagging when an estimate depends on a part of the system nobody has documented.
• Review designs and code for others, and mentor less experienced engineers, including guiding them through the RFC process.
• Take responsibility for the quality and productivity of the team beyond your own assigned work.

Qualifications

• Seven or more years building production backend software, including services that carried meaningful volume.
• Experience operating what you build. You have instrumented your own services, been called about them, and fixed them yourself.
• Comfort in an established codebase you did not write, where behavior is not fully documented, and the ability to work out what a system does before changing it.
• Practical experience with asynchronous, queue-driven, or event-driven systems and their failure modes, including retries, duplicates, backpressure, partial failure, and out-of-order delivery.
• Automated testing as a normal part of how you work.
• Strong written communication in English, and a track record of making progress across time zones rather than waiting for the next overlap window.
• Based in India, with regular working overlap with colleagues in Europe and the United States.

Preferred

• Messaging, notification, or delivery infrastructure at scale, covering email, SMS, voice, or push, including deliverability, throttling, and provider limits.
• Managed cloud messaging and serverless building blocks, such as hosted queues and pub/sub, event-driven compute, and NoSQL data stores, on any major cloud provider.
• Kubernetes, infrastructure-as-code, and comfort operating in a multi-cloud environment.
• Experience with C or C++ alongside a higher-level language such as Python.
• Instrumenting a system that had little observability, and building alerts a team comes to trust.
• Incremental modernization of a running system, including strangler patterns, coexistence, and migration without a freeze.
• Raising the technical bar on a team through mentoring, review, and improving shared practice.
• Fluency with AI-assisted development tools, and judgment about where they help.
• Experience building software where failure has consequences for the people using it.

Residency Requirement

Finalsite offers 100% fully remote employment opportunities, however, these opportunities are limited to permanent residents of India. Current residency, as well as continued residency, within India is required to obtain (and retain) employment with Finalsite.

Disclosures

Finalsite is proud to be an equal opportunity workplace and is an affirmative action employer. We are committed to equal employment opportunities regardless of race, color, ancestry, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, age, citizenship, marital status, disability, gender identity or Veteran status.