Senior Software Engineer (New York)

EARLY SENIOR ENGINEER

Salary $140k - $190k base | 2-5% equity | New York City (in-person)

ABOUT TRUEMARK

AI is changing what it means to learn to write. Students can now generate an essay in seconds – but the process of struggling with an idea, forming an argument, and putting it into their own words is still how they learn to think. And the more students turn to AI as a crutch for learning, the more quickly they fall behind in school.

At the core, TrueMark helps schools and universities protect that process while figuring out where AI belongs in the classroom. We think this is one of the most important problems facing education right now, and it only becomes more urgent as AI gets better. 

In our first 18 months since launching, we’ve:

• Amassed almost 50 paying schools/districts from grades 4-12 and higher ed, including Phillips Exeter and Boston College 
• Won a US Dept of Education grant to research AI’s impact on student learning
• Have state contracts with New York and Montana
• Raised funding from Thrive Capital (investors in OpenAI, Cursor, and Instagram), the US Dept of Education, and LearnLaunch

Students spend tens of thousands of hours writing on our platform each week, and we process tens of millions of edits. And our product works: 65% of monthly active users are weekly active, and our highest usage school saw their test scores increase 18% in their first year.

Our founders, Will and Shelley, are both technical. They worked at Google and Stripe before this, and before that, they met at Brown where they bonded over creating a new Computer Science course together for their senior year capstones.

We’re a small team based in NYC, and we’re still early enough that the people joining now will meaningfully shape both the product and the company.

This is an opportunity to join as an early engineer and help answer a question that will shape a generation of students:  how students build critical thinking skills in an AI world. 

WHAT YOU’LL WORK ON

Select technical challenges you’ll face in your first 6 months:

• Moving our patent-pending integrity analysis from running all at once after a document is submitted to running bit-by-bit in real-time as edits stream in. This will allow teachers to intervene with academic integrity issues during class instead of playing detective weeks later. This means rethinking the entire computation model.

• Training typing behavior models on proprietary data to detect anomalies based on custom features that you decide, such as student typing speed and correction ratios.

• Improving AI rubric grading to achieve industry-leading consistency across grade levels, and systematize ways to measure our performance. This means ML and systems design, not just prompt engineering.

• Building a peer paper repository for cross-student similarity search at scale.

What the day-to-day will be like:

• Work with the founders, talk to customers, and have input on the roadmap

• Own the platform’s reliability and the engineering team’s velocity as a “player-coach”

You’d work with 1-2 other engineers. Essentially, we’d like you to be (or become) an IC-focused tech lead as we expand our team over the next 12 to 18 months.

WHO YOU ARE

You’re a strong, thoughtful engineer. You’re comfortable designing systems, debugging subtle race conditions, and writing production-ready code with little help.

You’re self-directed and take ownership. You know when to ask questions, when to pull others in, and when to make a reasonable decision and keep moving. An open-ended task like “figure out how we should approach reliability” sounds interesting.

You’re a clear, positive, communicative teammate. You collaborate well, share context, and are comfortable raising concerns or working through disagreements.

You’re product- and user-minded. You want to understand the problems teachers and students are actually facing. If a teacher is struggling with something you built, you care about understanding why and making it better.

You’re pragmatic. You can make thoughtful tradeoffs between speed, quality, and complexity. You have an intuition for when the details matter and when a simpler solution is good enough.

You’re curious and always learning. You care about building good software and staying on top of how the craft is changing in the age of AI.

QUALIFICATIONS

• 3–8 years of professional engineering experience, with depth in backend systems

• Strong fundamentals: databases, API design, data modeling, system reliability

• Full-stack capable—backend is the core, but you work across the stack (Python and React/NextJS)

• Experience owning production systems where reliability mattered

• Ideally based in NYC or willing to relocate

Bonus: Relevant startup experience; experience building core backend systems for scale, prior edtech experience

HOW TO APPLY

If you’re interested, please apply through this form and include your resume:

Please apply through the form only, because we do not review applications submitted through LinkedIn. If you have any questions, you can email us at View email address on apply.placed-app.com.