Staff Software Engineer

Help set the technical direction for the digital future of educational travel!

At EF Educational Tours, we're on a mission to open the world through education, adventure, & cultural immersion... and we're scaling our digital experiences to match that ambition! As our Staff Software Engineer, you'll be one of the most senior individual contributors on the team, setting architecture and technical direction across the customer-facing websites, portals, and internal platforms that power multiple products and markets. You'll lead from the front end out: owning how our web platform is built, how it performs, and how it scales. All while working across the stack with engineers, designers, marketers, and product managers to ship personalized, performant, and impactful experiences.

What You'll Do

• Set the technical direction for our web platform and the standards that our applications are built on (React, Next.js, TypeScript, Node.js)
• Make and document architecture decisions that span multiple applications and teams, balancing speed today with maintainability tomorrow
• Guide system design across the stack-GraphQL APIs, Salesforce and other integrations, headless CMS, and cloud infrastructure (AWS, Vercel, Cloudflare)
• Own the performance, reliability, security, and accessibility of our customer-facing sites, with Core Web Vitals and SEO treated as first-class requirements
• Lead the modernization of legacy systems, including retiring a legacy CMS through incremental, low-risk migrations
• Raise the bar on quality and developer experience: testing strategy, CI/CD, and infrastructure-as-code
• Use AI-assisted development tools (like Claude & Cursor) thoughtfully, and help the team adopt them in ways that speed us up without compromising quality
• Stay hands-on: build the hardest pieces, prototype new patterns, and review the code that sets the bar for everyone else
• Mentor engineers across levels and grow the team's architectural thinking
• Be the technical voice with product, design, marketing, and business leaders: turn strategy into a technical roadmap and explain trade-offs, risks, and costs in plain terms
• Work closely with subject matter experts across the business to understand how things really work, and turn that knowledge into sound designs
• Build alignment across teams and stakeholders through written proposals, design reviews, and presentations, and drive decisions to closure

What You Bring

• 8-12+ years of software engineering experience, with deep expertise in front-end and web platform engineering
• A track record of setting architecture across multiple applications or teams, not just within one codebase
• Expert-level React, TypeScript, and Next.js, including server-side rendering and caching strategies

  Strong system design skills: APIs, data flow, distributed services, and failure modes across the full stack

• Full-stack range: backend services in Node.js (or .NET), GraphQL API design, and integrating with enterprise systems such as Salesforce
• Hands-on experience with AWS (Lambda, ECS), modern hosting and edge platforms like Vercel or Cloudflare, and infrastructure-as-code (Terraform or CDK)
• A solid grounding in application security, testing strategy, and web performance at scale
• Hands-on experience using AI coding tools in your daily work, and a clear view on where they help and where they don't
• Excellent communication with technical and non-technical audiences-you can write the proposal, present it to leadership, and bring stakeholders along
• Experience influencing without authority, partnering with leaders and subject matter experts outside engineering to reach decisions

Bonus Skills

• Experience building or scaling a shared component library or design system
• Experience with headless CMS platforms (e.g., Storyblok) and legacy CMS migrations (e.g., Sitecore)
• Experience shipping multi-brand, multi-language sites
• Experience with personalization and experimentation platforms (e.g., Optimizely)
• Domain expertise in education, travel, or e-commerce
• Visible technical leadership through talks, writing, or open source

Who You Are

• An owner: you see a problem across the platform and take it from ambiguity to shipped, without waiting to be asked
• A builder with strong architectural judgment and deep curiosity for web tech
• A clear communicator who is as comfortable with a business stakeholder as with an engineer
• An empathetic mentor who makes the engineers around you better
• Curious about AI and how it is changing the way software gets built
• Pragmatic-you know when to be thorough and when to move fast, and you can explain the difference
• Excited to work in our Boston office, with occasional travel (< 10%, e.g. Zurich)

Why you’ll love working here: Perks, Benefits, and more!

This is the most fun, high caliber place you’ll ever work. Ask any employee why they love EF (whether they’ve been here 10 minutes or 10 years) and they’ll probably tell you the same thing: it’s the people. When you work at EF, you join a purpose-driven, international and energetic community that thrives on continuous learning, fearless innovation and mutual support. In addition, you can expect:

• Commitment to professional growth: robust monthly calendar of trainings and workshops
• Four weeks paid vacation your first year, ten paid holidays, and two floating holidays
• Exciting business travel opportunities
• 25% company match on your 401(k) contributions
• Market-leading medical, dental and vision coverage, along with options for life and disability insurance, accident and hospital insurance, legal and pet insurance
• Dependent care, healthcare and commuter Flex Spending Accounts (FSAs)

  Access to fertility care and family-building support

• Wellness benefits including a yearly fitness reimbursement
• Frequent social and learning events, including access to our employee-run resource groups
• Robust Employee Assistance Program
• Tenure-based sabbatical eligibility
• EF Product Discounts (discounts on travel, international language schools, Au Pair program and more)
• Discounts at local venues and businesses
• Amazing offices designed to match the caliber of the people who work there! This is a hybrid role requiring 4-days onsite with the flexibility of working from home one day per week.
• This role has an anticipated compensation range of $145,000-$185,000 based on experience.