Senior Software Engineer I

Summary:

NHA’s Application Development team builds and operates our proprietary, cloud-native Student Information System - the platform that 100+ schools and tens of thousands of students, families, and staff rely on every day. The Senior Software Engineer I leads well-scoped, moderately complex projects from design through production, and raises the bar for the engineers around them through mentorship and code review.

We build in a modern .NET (C#) service-oriented backend and an Angular/Nx front-end, deploy continuously through Azure DevOps, and modernize legacy systems as we go. As an AI-friendly team, we expect engineers to use modern AI development tools responsibly, with care for the student and staff data our systems handle.

Company Information:

National Heritage Academies (NHA) partners with communities to build and operate public charter schools. Founded in 1995, today NHA serves over 100 schools in nine states, with more than 65,000 students in kindergarten through 12th grade. Our schools are designed to eliminate the achievement gap and provide school choice to families so their children are prepared for success in college, career, and life. A majority of our schools consistently outperform their local district on the state test. According to the Center for Research on Education Outcomes at Stanford University, NHA is a leading performer among charter schools and management organizations, outperforming both conventional district schools and other charter school operators. In addition, according to our employee survey, over 90% of respondents agree that the work they do is meaningful to them. Join our team.

Duties and Responsibilities:

• Design, develop, test, and deliver features, enhancements, and fixes across NHA’s proprietary Student Information System and related custom applications, spanning the API, user interface, and data layers.
• Write secure, well-tested, and maintainable code in accordance with team standards, and support it in production.
• Participate in code reviews, technical design discussions, and Agile ceremonies (e.g., SAFe/Scrum).
• Diagnose and resolve production issues in supported areas using application logs and observability tooling; provide production support as needed.
• Contribute to the ongoing modernization of legacy components onto NHA’s current technology stack.
• Use modern AI development tools responsibly to improve productivity and code quality, exercising sound technical judgment and safeguarding sensitive student and staff data.
• Collaborate with team members, product owners, quality assurance, and other stakeholders to plan and deliver complete solutions.
• Maintain the confidentiality and integrity of student and staff data in accordance with NHA policy and applicable law.
• Lead well-scoped, moderately complex projects within a system from design through delivery.
• Design feature- and project-level architecture, applying established patterns and weighing maintainability and testability.
• Own the quality and production health of delivered features, diagnosing and resolving issues from logs and observability.
• Mentor and review the work of less-experienced engineers.
• Coordinate with adjacent teams and stakeholders, and participate in the release-owner rotation.
• Perform other duties as assigned.

Qualifications:

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Computer Information Systems, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
• 3-5 years of software engineering experience.
• Proficiency with a modern object-oriented back-end language and a modern front-end framework (NHA’s stack includes Microsoft .NET/C# and Angular/TypeScript).
• Working knowledge of relational databases and SQL.
• Experience with version control and CI/CD pipelines (NHA uses Git and Azure DevOps).
• Experience working on an Agile software development team (SAFe, Scrum, or similar).
• Strong written and verbal communication skills, including the ability to explain technical concepts to non-technical audiences.
• A collaborative, coachable, and accountable approach to teamwork.
• Broad proficiency across both front-end and back-end development (comfortable working full-stack).
• Strong technical judgment on trade-offs and a track record of owning projects to production.
• Ability to connect technical decisions to business outcomes.
• Experience with C#/.NET and Angular/TypeScript (our core stack) preferred.
• Experience with service-based architecture patterns and SQL performance preferred.
• Experience with modern identity (Okta / OpenID Connect) and production observability (Elastic APM) preferred.
• Experience with CI/CD in Azure DevOps and containerized services preferred.

This is an in-person position at our NHA Service Center located at 3850 Broadmoor Ave., Grand Rapids, MI.

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National Heritage Academies is an equal-opportunity employer.