Principal Founding Full Stack Software Engineer (NYC Hybrid) 235K+

We're tackling one of the defining challenges of our time: how do you educate entire nations of young people in today's most valuable skills when they may lack reliable internet, expensive devices, or access to quality education? We believe access to digital tools and skills is foundational - not just to individual opportunity, but to closing the global digital divide. Through our learning programs and open-source initiatives, we work to ensure that underserved communities worldwide can become not just digital consumers, but creators. Our strategy revolves around Community Game Making. Our flagship project is a free, open-source game built to be fun to play and approachable to contributors at every skill level. Around it, we've built a learning community where young people progress from player to creator to contributor - developing real, transferable skills in game development and the broader digital economy through peer-to-peer mentorship and collaborative project work. We've proven the model works with thousands of learners across the Global South, and we're now ready to scale to millions.

About the Role

At the center of our community is a web platform that weaves together learning experiences, learner recognition, portfolio publishing, and the tools contributors need to participate in a real game project. We're looking for an Engineering Lead to own the technical direction and day-to-day engineering operations of that platform. This is a hands-on role that combines deep technical expertise with team and delivery management. On the technical side, you'll drive architecture decisions, set code standards, and participate actively in engineering - solving complex problems and ensuring high-quality output across a full-stack codebase. You'll also lead the team's engineering practices, from code review and QA to monitoring and the smart use of AI tools to keep the team moving fast. On the people and delivery side, you'll run the team's agile processes - standups, sprint planning, retrospectives, issue triage - and serve as the primary point of contact between engineers and the rest of the organization. You'll work closely with Product to establish roadmap priorities, validate work in progress against product intentions, and help translate product requirements into actionable engineering work. This is a role for someone who leads from the front - technically sharp, operationally rigorous, and able to keep a distributed team aligned and moving at pace.

Responsibilities

• Drive code standards & technical architecture norms
• Own technical/engineering roadmap and architecture
• Seek and implement best engineering practices (e.g. how AI can help internal engineering, how to improve monitoring & incident response, shared code review norms, technical documentation, how to get the most out of QA)
• Participate in thorough code review to ensure quality and contribute to team momentum
• Participate in software engineering, offering a high degree of proficiency
• Run day-to-day operations (standups, sprint planning, retrospective, issue triage)
• Enhance team communication and collaboration, define practices such as meeting schedule and structure, rituals, and team updates
• Report progress against the roadmap to the Product Manager, flagging risks
• Communicate priorities within the team & assign resources
• Raise & resolve impediments that are slowing down progress
• Act as a primary point of contact between the engineers & rest of business, day-to-day
• Responsiveness for bugs & questions: “How does chat work”
• Validate work in progress against requirements and product intentions
• Ensure the team understands the product strategy (in collaboration with Product Manager)
• Contribute to roadmap planning and prioritization discussions (in collaboration with Product Manager)
• Translate product requirements into well-defined engineering tickets and team priorities

Qualifications

• 8+ years software development experience
• 2+ years engineering team management experience
• 1+ years of experience using AI technologies in a professional context IN PRODUCTION

Required Skills

• Strong engineering team management experience. You can smoothly and effectively run the day-to-day agile engineering processes of a small team.
• Product collaboration skills. You can help take product features from ideation to actionable tickets, working closely with the Product Manager on planning and prioritisation. You’re a key part of the product roadmap formation, with enough product instinct to push back constructively when needed and to help the team stay focused on the right problems.
• Meticulous communication and organisational skills. You don’t let requests get dropped, or questions go unanswered. You ensure key information gets recorded in the right places. You ensure the team understands what we’re doing and why, even in those eventful moments when everything is rapidly changing. In addition to engineers, you regularly collaborate with product management, marketing, and other departments.
• Agility & adaptability. You regularly use AI technologies to maximize your productivity. You can embody our team values and ways of working. You work at a blazing fast pace, and your colleagues have to work hard to keep up with you. You’re comfortable working with distributed teams.

Preferred Skills

• Experience improving team practices and processes in a fast-paced environment
• Technical mentorship experience
• Experience building teams that scaled or transitioned to other organisations