{"id":3685873,"url":"https://alion.io/job/ef-education-first-staff-software-engineer","title":"Staff Software Engineer","company":{"id":93438,"name":"EF Education First","domain":"ef.com","url":"https://alion.io/company/ef","size_band":"1001-5000","is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"Oracle","truth_index":{"grade":"B","score":77,"open_postings":33,"ghost_share":0,"stale_share":0.939,"repost_share":0,"time_to_fill_p50_days":29,"computed_at":"2026-11-04T06:34:25Z"}},"role":"Backend","role_family":"Backend","seniority":"staff","employment_type":null,"work_mode":"hybrid","remote_scope":null,"remote_scope_basis":null,"remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"structured","locations":["Cambridge, United States"],"countries":["US"],"hiring_countries":[],"hiring_countries_total":0,"salary":{"min":145000,"max":185000,"currency":"USD","period":"year","gross":null,"usd_annual":185000},"salary_estimate":null,"experience_years_min":8,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":false,"technologies":[{"name":".NET","optional":false},{"name":"Amazon ECS","optional":false},{"name":"AWS","optional":false},{"name":"AWS Lambda","optional":false},{"name":"CI/CD","optional":false},{"name":"Claude","optional":false},{"name":"Cloudflare","optional":false},{"name":"Cursor","optional":false},{"name":"GraphQL","optional":false},{"name":"Next.js","optional":false},{"name":"Node JS","optional":false},{"name":"Platform Engineering","optional":false},{"name":"React.js","optional":false},{"name":"Terraform","optional":false},{"name":"TypeScript","optional":false},{"name":"Vercel","optional":false},{"name":"C#","optional":true},{"name":"JavaScript","optional":true}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-11-03T14:05:37Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-11-03","last_verified_at":"2026-11-04T13:13:13Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":0,"trust":{"level":"ok","repost_count":null,"flags":[],"days_open":0},"description":"Help set the technical direction for the digital future of educational travel!\nAt 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.\nWhat You'll Do\nSet the technical direction for our web platform and the standards that our applications are built on (React, Next.js, TypeScript, Node.js) \nMake and document architecture decisions that span multiple applications and teams, balancing speed today with maintainability tomorrow \nGuide system design across the stack-GraphQL APIs, Salesforce and other integrations, headless CMS, and cloud infrastructure (AWS, Vercel, Cloudflare) \nOwn the performance, reliability, security, and accessibility of our customer-facing sites, with Core Web Vitals and SEO treated as first-class requirements \nLead the modernization of legacy systems, including retiring a legacy CMS through incremental, low-risk migrations \nRaise the bar on quality and developer experience: testing strategy, CI/CD, and infrastructure-as-code \nUse AI-assisted development tools (like Claude & Cursor) thoughtfully, and help the team adopt them in ways that speed us up without compromising quality \nStay hands-on: build the hardest pieces, prototype new patterns, and review the code that sets the bar for everyone else \nMentor engineers across levels and grow the team's architectural thinking \nBe 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 \nWork closely with subject matter experts across the business to understand how things really work, and turn that knowledge into sound designs \nBuild alignment across teams and stakeholders through written proposals, design reviews, and presentations, and drive decisions to closure\nWhat You Bring\n8-12+ years of software engineering experience, with deep expertise in front-end and web platform engineering \nA track record of setting architecture across multiple applications or teams, not just within one codebase \nExpert-level React, TypeScript, and Next.js, including server-side rendering and caching strategiesStrong system design skills: APIs, data flow, distributed services, and failure modes across the full stack \n\nFull-stack range: backend services in Node.js (or .NET), GraphQL API design, and integrating with enterprise systems such as Salesforce \nHands-on experience with AWS (Lambda, ECS), modern hosting and edge platforms like Vercel or Cloudflare, and infrastructure-as-code (Terraform or CDK) \nA solid grounding in application security, testing strategy, and web performance at scale \nHands-on experience using AI coding tools in your daily work, and a clear view on where they help and where they don't \nExcellent communication with technical and non-technical audiences-you can write the proposal, present it to leadership, and bring stakeholders along \nExperience influencing without authority, partnering with leaders and subject matter experts outside engineering to reach decisions\nBonus Skills\nExperience building or scaling a shared component library or design system \nExperience with headless CMS platforms (e.g., Storyblok) and legacy CMS migrations (e.g., Sitecore) \nExperience shipping multi-brand, multi-language sites \nExperience with personalization and experimentation platforms (e.g., Optimizely) \nDomain expertise in education, travel, or e-commerce \nVisible technical leadership through talks, writing, or open source \nWho You Are\nAn owner: you see a problem across the platform and take it from ambiguity to shipped, without waiting to be asked \nA builder with strong architectural judgment and deep curiosity for web tech \nA clear communicator who is as comfortable with a business stakeholder as with an engineer \nAn empathetic mentor who makes the engineers around you better \nCurious about AI and how it is changing the way software gets built \nPragmatic-you know when to be thorough and when to move fast, and you can explain the difference \nExcited to work in our Boston office, with occasional travel (< 10%, e.g. Zurich)\nWhy you’ll love working here: Perks, Benefits, and more!\nThis 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:\nCommitment to professional growth: robust monthly calendar of trainings and workshops \nFour weeks paid vacation your first year, ten paid holidays, and two floating holidays \nExciting business travel opportunities \n25% company match on your 401(k) contributions \nMarket-leading medical, dental and vision coverage, along with options for life and disability insurance, accident and hospital insurance, legal and pet insurance \nDependent care, healthcare and commuter Flex Spending Accounts (FSAs)Access to fertility care and family-building support \n\nWellness benefits including a yearly fitness reimbursement \nFrequent social and learning events, including access to our employee-run resource groups \nRobust Employee Assistance Program \nTenure-based sabbatical eligibility \nEF Product Discounts (discounts on travel, international language schools, Au Pair program and more) \nDiscounts at local venues and businesses \nAmazing 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. \nThis role has an anticipated compensation range of $145,000-$185,000 based on experience.","description_format":"text","description_chars":6349,"description_truncated":false,"requirements":{"experience_years_min":8,"management_years_min":null,"team_size_min":null,"manages_managers":false,"education":null,"security_clearance":false,"languages":[]},"benefits":["Continuous learning"],"hiring_locations":[{"name":"United States","iso":"US","kind":"country"}],"hiring_excludes":[],"relocation_offered":false,"industries":["Travel Agencies","Higher Education","Language Learning"],"lifecycle":[{"event":"open","at":"2026-11-03T14:56:43Z"}],"visa":[],"liveness":{"score":63,"band":"ok","label":"Likely open","p_open":1,"p_active":0.632,"p_room":1,"age_days":0,"expected_fill_days":29,"reasons":["conf:4","stale_co","velocity","win:early","comp:brand"],"computed_at":"2026-11-04T06:34:25Z"},"pay":{"stated_usd_annual":185000,"is_top_pay":false},"html_url":"https://alion.io/job/ef-education-first-staff-software-engineer","json_url":"https://alion.io/job/ef-education-first-staff-software-engineer.json","meta":{"generated_at":"2026-11-04T13:18:30Z","cache_seconds":300,"methodology":"https://alion.io/methodology","terms":"https://alion.io/terms","contact":"https://alion.io/contact","api":"https://alion.io/developers","about":"Alion is a live layer of people, companies and AI agents: who they are, whether they are real and active right now, what they do and how to work with them, readable by people and by agents and paid per call.","catalog":"https://alion.io/catalog.json","usage":{"tier":"crawler_verified","counted_by":"address","units_charged":1,"used_today":20141,"day_limit":null,"remaining_today":null,"minute_limit":300,"resets_at":"2026-11-05T00:00:00Z"}},"offers":[{"id":"company.slices","title":"One company in depth, by slice","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002,"plus_per_slice":{"credits":0.05,"usd":0.005}},"unit":"per company, plus each slice with data","note":"the employer in depth","call":{"mcp_tool":"get_company","arguments":{"id":93438},"rest":"https://alion.io/mcp/rest/get_company?id=93438"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.slices&for=job%2Fef-education-first-staff-software-engineer"},{"id":"market.stats","title":"A market slice: pay, demand and time to fill","status":"live","price":{"credits":1,"usd":0.1},"unit":"per slice","note":"pay, demand and time to fill for this role and place","call":{"mcp_tool":"market_stats"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=market.stats&for=job%2Fef-education-first-staff-software-engineer"},{"id":"job.search","title":"Open jobs by role, technology, place, pay and visa","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002},"unit":"per posting in a list","note":"similar open postings","call":{"mcp_tool":"search_jobs"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=job.search&for=job%2Fef-education-first-staff-software-engineer"},{"id":"company.verify","title":"Is this company real and active right now","status":"pilot","price":null,"unit":"per company","request":{"url":"https://alion.io/catalog/request","method":"POST","body":"{\"offer\": \"company.verify\", \"for\": \"job/ef-education-first-staff-software-engineer\", \"note\": \"what you need it for\"}"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.verify&for=job%2Fef-education-first-staff-software-engineer"}],"agent":{"mcp":"https://alion.io/mcp/jobs","mcp_open":"https://alion.io/mcp/open","next":[{"tool":"get_job","arguments":{"id":3685873}},{"tool":"search_jobs","arguments":{"company":"ef.com","detail":"compact"}},{"tool":"match_people","arguments":{"job_id":3685873},"note":"people open to offers who fit this vacancy"}],"note":"The same data through MCP tools: https://alion.io/mcp/open needs no sign-in (compact searches, postings, people); https://alion.io/mcp with an Alion account has everything. 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