Software Engineer II

The Role

We’re looking for a Software Engineer II, Fullstack to design and implement solid architectural solutions with the rest of the engineering team, supporting our Pear Assessment product - a platform that provides real-time, interactive formative assessments, enabling teachers to capture diverse student responses, gain instant insights, and adapt instruction across live and self-paced learning environments.

With a passion for solving problems quickly and delivering high-quality code, you will build features that enable real-time formative assessments and actionable learning insights for educators. You’ll work across the full stack—from crafting intuitive React-based classroom experiences and interactive assessment workflows to designing scalable backend services and optimizing data pipelines that power instant feedback and analytics. You will also contribute to OpenSearch-powered semantic search capabilities, enabling fast and relevant discovery across more than 500 million educational documents. Our Engineering team thrives on a purpose-driven culture of collaboration, openness, trust, and transparency, with individuals who continuously push boundaries to improve teaching and learning outcomes.

_________________________________________________________________________________________

What You'll Do

• Design, build, and continually improve our Pear Assessment product and related services
• Build and ship features that power real-time formative assessments and classroom engagement experiences for educators and students.

• Develop & maintain high-performance backend services in Typescript that power the assessment platform
• Develop intuitive, high-performance React interfaces for interactive assessments, dashboards, and data visualization
• Develop and enhance OpenSearch-based semantic search systems to enable fast, relevant discovery across hundreds of millions of educational documents
• Optimize data pipelines and queries to deliver low-latency insights and feedback to teachers during live and asynchronous sessions
• Collaborate cross-functionally with product, design, and data teams to translate educational needs into impactful technical solutions.
• Ensure system reliability, scalability, and performance under high usage across classrooms and districts.
• Continuously improve code quality, testing practices, and engineering standards within a collaborative team environment.
• Participate in architecture discussions, code reviews, and continuous improvement initiatives
• Architect and operate cloud-native systems on AWS, leveraging services like SQS for asynchronous processing and event-driven workflows.
• Work with MongoDB and other data stores to model, store, and efficiently query large-scale assessment and engagement data.
• Integrate AWS IoT services where applicable to support real-time classroom device interactions and data ingestion.
• Integrate LLM/AI services to power intelligent features such as automated insights, content generation, and enhanced search relevance.

Who You Are

• 4+ years of professional industry experience building and delivering scalable software features in a production environment
• Strong experience with Javascript/Typescript/Nodejs/Python and familiarity with concurrency patterns, APIs, and service-oriented architecture
• Experience building modern React applications with TypeScript, including working with APIs, state management, and responsive UI components
• Familiarity with designing and consuming APIs (REST/WSS) and contributing to backend services handling moderate to high traffic
• Working knowledge of databases (SQL or NoSQL such as MongoDB/PostgreSQL), including basic query optimization and data modeling
• Understanding of caching concepts (e.g., Redis) and performance optimization techniques
• Experience working with cloud platforms (AWS preferred) and services like S3, SQS, or similar
• Experience with modern frontend tooling and libraries (e.g., React Query, component libraries)
• Ability to build reliable, maintainable, and scalable features with guidance from senior engineers
• Strong ownership mindset with a focus on code quality, testing, and continuous improvement
• Good communication skills and ability to collaborate effectively across teams
• Comfortable working in a fast-paced, evolving environment with a willingness to learn and grow
• Motivated by the opportunity to build impactful products in the education space

Nice to Have

• Experience with big data analytics tools (AWS Athena, Spark, or similar query engines)

• Experience integrating with LLM/AI APIs (Gemini, OpenAI, or similar)

• Experience with message queues and event-driven architectures (SQS, Kafka, RabbitMQ)
• Prior experience in EdTech or building products for K-12 education
• Familiarity with containerization (Docker) and basic orchestration concepts
• Exposure to data processing or aggregation workflows for generating insights from application data
• Something else? Tell us! We want to learn more about you…

 What We Offer 

• Competitive pay, health insurance, accident insurance, life insurance, and a retirement savings plan.
• Paid annual leave, paid holidays, paid parental leave, paid leave for life events, and a paid year-end holiday break.
• A robust catalog of benefits that support your professional growth and personal wellbeing, including work from home funds, wellness checks, and more…

Plus the intangible:

• A varied and challenging role in an innovative, global company.
• Supportive, driven colleagues who have your back and share your passion.