Senior Software Engineer

Job Description: Senior Software Engineer

Location: Hybrid (New York, NY) or Remote

About Gaia K-12

At Gaia K-12, we’re transforming the way public school cafeterias operate. Our mission is to empower school nutrition teams to focus on creating healthy and delicious meals by providing user-friendly, next-generation tools tailored to their needs.

Our team is driven by innovation, collaboration, and a passion for making a meaningful impact. We believe in giving our teammates the autonomy to make their own decisions, being customer-obsessed and empathetic, fostering transparency and collaboration, and embracing endless curiosity.

The Role

We are seeking a Senior Software Engineer for our Technology team, reporting to the CTO. As a Senior Software Engineer, you will play a critical role in building key components of our software and supporting the success of our customers. You will work closely with the team to build, scale, and optimize our product/platform, while fostering a collaborative and creative work environment. You’ll also work directly with our advisors and customers to hear their challenges first-hand and show how the solutions we’re building can help them. This is a unique opportunity to leave your mark on a modern technology platform and help shape the future of public school nutrition.

This role is ideal for someone who thrives on solving complex problems, designing scalable solutions, and mentoring teammates while contributing directly to the success of a mission-driven SaaS company. You’ll build and deliver key features, make software architecture decisions, design data models, enhance our CI/CD pipeline, and help evolve our technology and our processes.

You will work closely with our existing engineering team, customers, and cross-functional partners to deliver impactful solutions and keep our platform running smoothly and evolving to meet the needs of school nutrition teams nationwide.

Our Technology

Our platform leverages tools like Node, TypeScript, RedwoodJS, Prisma, MySQL, Redis, and GraphQL to power our functionality, along with ReactJS and MaterialUI on the front-end to create beautiful and accessible interfaces. We are a 100% cloud-native platform hosted in AWS and utilize tools like FlightControl and Terraform to efficiently and reliably build, maintain, and scale our infrastructure. We rely on code reviews, pull requests, automated code scans (with tools like Snyk), and automated CI/CD pipelines to test and deploy frequently, and monitor application performance using tools like DataDog.

Who You Are

We’re looking for someone who:

• Has held engineering roles at a minimum of two companies


• Can demonstrate expertise across the full software stack, both frontend and backend


• Has experience building applications with Node and related frameworks like ExpressJS, NestJS, RedwoodJS, or other web frameworks


• Can build beautiful, usable, accessible user interfaces using technologies like ReactJS and design frameworks like MaterialUI or Ant Design.


• Loves working directly with customers to hear about their challenges and help design solutions for them


• Can design highly performant, secure, scalable, cloud-native solutions from the ground up based on problem statements and requirements


• Has demonstrated experience designing and evolving relational data models


• Prioritizes delivery speed and “done” over “perfect”


• Experience with AI/ML, natural language processing technologies, and/or data science

What Success Looks Like

After 1 month

You’ll have gone through our onboarding and gone deep into the details of school nutrition programs and their day-to-day challenges around data, operations, and compliance. You’ll have jumped right into our codebase to understand our platform and begin contributing at your own initial pace.

After 6 months

You’ll have been working with the team to continue delivering expanded platform functionality and be working directly with our customers to help them get implemented, launched, and work through any day-to-day needs. You’ll lay out new roadmaps and decisions based on learnings and retrospectives and implement new features and use cases. You’ll be a key player in getting technology defined, built, tested, and productionalized by evolving our processes and automation.

Beyond 1 year

You’ll be a key leader as we grow the team and hire additional engineers. As we continue to deliver new functionality to the market, you’ll be a key player in the design, development, and launch of the technology that powers it.

Why Gaia?

• Purpose-Driven Work: Help schools deliver healthy, delicious meals to students while making a lasting impact.


• Growth Opportunities: Join a fast-growing company with opportunities to shape its direction and grow into leadership roles.


• Collaborative Team Culture: Work with passionate, innovative people who value teamwork and creativity.


• Competitive Compensation: Enjoy a competitive salary, equity, and a comprehensive benefits package, including health, dental, and vision.


• Flexible workplace: Join our hybrid NYC based team or remote with occasional travel for in person team meetings

Ready to Join?

If this role sounds like a fit, please apply! Do you check some of the boxes above, but are hesitant to apply because you haven’t used some of our specific technologies? Apply anyway - we are looking for smart, ambitious teammates who are problem solvers at heart. If this sounds like you, we look forward to hearing from you!