Software Architect

COMPANY OVERVIEW Accelerate Learning provides STEM curriculum and professional development solutions that empower teachers, increase scores, and inspire students to become tomorrow’s STEM leaders. Its award-winning STEMscopes and Math Nation curricula and resources are highly adaptable, accessible, and support instruction in any learning environment. The comprehensive, results-oriented solutions are used by more than 9 million students and 750,000 teachers across the country. “For teachers, by teachers” is not a slogan—it’s a fact. Our flagship product, STEMscopes, was incubated in the classroom and developed by over 200 teachers, science experts, and science professors. Our origins lie in providing teachers a model for implementing inquiry-based learning in the classroom and are still core to how we develop and enhance our products today. Accelerate Learning has always listened to the teachers by taking in feedback, best practices, and the latest pedagogy to develop the most effective STEM curriculum. Affordable for schools, engaging for students, and easy to use for teachers, Accelerate Learning drives student achievement by supplying teachers with comprehensive core content and supplemental activities delivered in customizable ways that can be adapted to unique teaching and learning styles. POSITION SUMMARY At Accelerate Learning, we’re dedicated to engaging and inspiring STEM education for PreK–12. Our mission is to spark curiosity in the STEM classroom with programs designed by experienced teachers and STEM experts. Supporting over 9 million students and 750,000 teachers, we constantly adapt to educators’ needs and customer feedback to promote powerful teaching strategies that shape the future of STEM learning. Our flagship product, STEMscopes, was incubated in classrooms and built by educators, scientists, and engineers. As we expand, we are investing heavily in modern cloud technologies, AI, and scalable product engineering. This is an opportunity to join as the Software Architect, serving as the end-to-end architectural authority for one or more core curriculum and supplemental product platforms. In this role you will own the full architectural lifecycle of assigned systems—spanning current production applications and future-state design. You will hold explicit accountability for non-functional requirements (performance, reliability, security, scalability, and maintainability), the ongoing maintenance and operability of live products, and will serve as an active participant in delivery—contributing hands-on alongside engineering teams. You will work closely with product, curriculum, and engineering teams to ensure technical solutions are robust, scalable, and aligned with Accelerate Learning’s mission to improve student outcomes through innovative instructional technology. This role balances system design, hands-on development, production system stewardship, and long-term platform evolution. POSITION RESPONSIBILITIES Serve as Software Architect for assigned core curriculum and supplemental applications/Services, holding end-to-end accountability for architectural integrity across both existing production micro services and new capabilities. Own the maintenance and operability of assigned production applications—ensuring systems remain healthy, supportable, and fully operational through disciplined incident management, dependency tracking, runbook maintenance, and proactive operational risk reduction. Own the ongoing architectural health of production systems—monitoring technical debt, identifying structural risk, and driving remediation plans that balance modernization with business continuity. Lead application maintainability efforts—incremental re-architecture, strangler fig migrations, and system consolidations assuring minimal disruption to live customers across core curriculum and supplemental product lines. Partner with Product, Agile Delivery and Engineering leadership to maintain a platform health backlog—making the cost and risk of deferred maintenance, architectural debt, and operability gaps visible and actionable at the team and leadership level. Review and approve architectural changes to production systems, including database schema migrations, infrastructure topology changes, and API contract modifications, with a bias toward operability and rollback safety. Ensure existing integrations (LMS/LTI, identity providers, content delivery, assessment platforms) remain secure, performant, and compliant with district and regulatory requirements (FERPA, COPPA). Act as the explicit owner of Non-Functional Requirements for assigned platforms—defining, measuring, and driving accountability for performance, scalability, reliability, security, and maintainability as first-class deliverables alongside feature work. Define performance and scalability targets in partnership with engineering and QA; oversee performance testing strategies (load testing, chaos engineering) to validate production readiness ahead of district onboarding cycles and school-year peaks. Establish observability standards: metrics, distributed tracing, structured logging, and alerting baselines that give teams early warning of degradation in existing systems. Operate as an active delivery participant—not solely an advisor. Contribute hands-on to proof-of-concept builds, critical path engineering work, and architectural spikes alongside the team. Collaborate closely with Tech Leads on sprint-level design decisions, ensuring architectural intent translates into executable, well-structured implementation. Participate in code and design reviews to enforce standards, catch structural drift early, and use review cycles as a teaching and alignment mechanism. Define the future-state product architecture for core curriculum and supplemental platforms, ensuring scalability, performance, and innovation across all products. Drive adoption of modern cloud-native architectures on AWS—event-driven, microservices, and Kubernetes-based patterns—appropriate to each product context. Design and evolve AI systems that support student tutoring, instructional assistance, and teacher insights features within core curriculum and supplemental products. Lead technical due diligence for new tools, frameworks, and vendor platforms, evaluating fit against existing architecture and operability standards before adoption. Mentor senior engineers, raising the technical bar and cultivating a culture of engineering excellence. Provide architectural oversight on critical initiatives such as AI/ML integration, advanced analytics, platform interoperability, and content management strategy. POSITION QUALIFICATIONS Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or a related technical discipline required; Master’s degree preferred. 7+ years of progressive software engineering experience, with at least 3 years in senior/architectural leadership roles. Demonstrated experience owning the architecture of complex, long-running production systems—including maintenance, technical debt management, incident response, and incremental modernization—not solely greenfield design. Proven success defining and delivering architectures for large-scale, cloud-native SaaS products (EdTech strongly preferred). Strong foundation in distributed systems, event-driven architectures, authentication/authorization (OAuth 2.0, OIDC, LTI), and API design. Proven hands-on experience with Kubernetes (K8s) in production environments, including workload management, autoscaling (KEDA), and cluster operations on AWS (EKS). Experience with AWS services at scale (EKS, RDS, DynamoDB, S3, CloudFront, SQS/SNS, API Gateway) and infrastructure-as-code practices (Terraform, CDK, Pulumi). Experience defining and tracking non-functional requirements—performance SLAs, scalability targets, reliability/availability goals, and security baselines—as formal, measurable deliverables. Demonstrated ability to balance long-term architectural vision with practical delivery of business priorities and production system stability. Advanced understanding of testing practices (e.g., Playwright, Jest) and CI/CD pipelines, with the ability to improve testing frameworks and release processes. Proven experience developing AI-driven applications leveraging platforms such as OpenAI or Anthropic Claude. Excellent communicator with experience collaborating across engineering, product, and business stakeholders. Candidates must be authorized to work in the United States on a permanent, ongoing basis without requiring any form of employer sponsorship, now or at any point in the future. We are unable to support any work authorization that is contingent on continued or future employer action.