Software Architect

Location: Remote (US) | Travel: 10-20%, regular onsite time with districts | Reports to: Director of Engineering Who We Are At Informed K12, we believe that operational excellence in school districts is one of the highest-leverage investments in public education. Our technology builds capacity for administrators and gives time and resources back to teachers by fixing one of the most overlooked problems in education: the slow, fragmented processes and workflows that carry a district's most critical work. We have been expanding our impact since 2012, building the product depth, customer relationships, and operational track record required for this work. For engineering, this is a build phase: we are in investment mode, growing the team and giving senior engineers room to define how AI changes the way software gets built here. Much of K-12 software grows by acquisition and cost-cutting. We grow by building, and we are hiring the people who will do it. Why the Problem is Interesting Our engineering challenges aren't about scale. They're about domain depth and distilling complexity into elegant primitives that model how districts actually work. School districts are among the most process-dense institutions in the country: every workflow encodes board policy, bargaining agreements, and state law, and every district encodes them differently. The hard problem is finding the primitives underneath 100 apparently unique processes — deciding what's essential variance and what's cruft and unnecessary complexity, without breaking workflows where a mistake means someone doesn't get paid. If you find that kind of complexity more interesting than another distributed-systems problem, you'll like it here. Why This Role Exists We're hiring an Architect to be the guardian of simplicity. Informed K12 has been working closely with districts for over a decade, which is long enough to learn the truth about software: the code that survives isn't the cleverest, it's the most maintainable. We think maintainability is one of the most important and most under-rated ideas in engineering. In the age of AI, anyone can ship a working feature in an afternoon; the scarce skill is keeping the system coherent as it grows. We're hiring our next Architect to be the guardian of simplicity of our core platform. You'll join at the stage where good architectural decisions compound and bad ones calcify — and you'll own the question of where engineering rigor moves when the code is increasingly written by machines, and how we guard it. What You'll Do Own the durability of our core platform data model and the discipline about when to add new structure versus leave things flexible Own API design across an increasingly programmatic surface: partner integrations, programmatic workflow APIs, authentication for partners and AI agents Own architectural review across core engineering, including the major migrations we expect to take on over the next 12 to 24 months Mentor senior ICs without becoming a bottleneck Own the patterns, tests, and tooling that make our AI-assisted engineering loop produce work we can stand behind Talk to enterprise customers in the room, not just through PMs, including real time onsite with our districts Bring a sharp point of view on AI, get ahead of the shift every software company is about to face, and leave your fingerprints on how we navigate it Who You Are You want your work to matter, and you agree that the truth about software is unglamourous: the maintainability of code and guarding against entropy over time is one of the toughest challenges in software engineering. You're energized by software where your data model decisions shape whether a teacher gets hired on time, a payroll clears, and a district's books close. You want your judgment operating under real pressure. You’ve sunsetted your own projects and can say what you learned. You can talk about decisions you made about code that became deep pain later on. You’re an architect who lives to live deep in the work: deep in the code rather than loosely involved. You’re well read in the ideas that shape this craft. You know exactly where you disagree with them, and your opinions come from production. What We Look For Required 10+ years of senior engineering experience, including significant time working with enterprise software, and ideally experience working at a platform company (not just an internal app team) Fluency with API design, data modeling for operational systems, and the trade-off space between tight and loose coupling Has shipped architectural migrations affecting many users without melting the customer base, and can describe the failure modes you avoided, not just the wins Uses Cursor, Claude Code, Codex, or equivalent in real production work and can articulate what AI makes cheap and what requires heavy guidance Has talked to enterprise customers in the room, not just through PMs, and holds substantive opinions on software design, architecture, and engineering Preferred Has published, talks or posts, not for the credential but as evidence of reflective practice Prior experience with regulated industries, K-12, or public-sector procurement How to Prepare We want to hear you reflect on your career and experiences. We want to see how your beliefs on engineering, product, and teams have evolved over time and how you put those beliefs into practice. We are not testing whether you've read a particular reading list. We are testing whether you've internalized the ideas and whether you can articulate where you disagree with them. If conversations about deep modules vs small functions, operational vs analytical data modeling, conceptual integrity, AI-on-the-loop engineering, and the inverse Conway maneuver are familiar territory, you'll feel at home in our process. How to Apply Every application is personally reviewed by a member of our team. Include the following in your application: A 1-paragraph answer to: "What is an architectural or data model decision that you made or saw that created painful downstream issues later on?" A link to writing or code we can read (any format) Optional: an opinion on a software book or thinker you consider overrated or underrated Benefits and Perks Healthcare coverage: 100% for employees, 35% for dependents. Uncapped PTO. Monthly productivity allowance (co-working space, coffee shop, working lunch). New hire stipend for remote office setup. Monthly wifi reimbursement. Annual personal office supply stipend. Skills development stipend (begins at 1-year anniversary). If you want to help school districts win, not just adopt software, we want to get to know you. Informed K12 is an equal-opportunity employer. We do not require degrees. We do require evidence. Compensation The base pay range for this role is $180,000 – $226,000 per year.