Senior Contract Software Engineer (Data & Platform)

About Nimble

We all know great teachers change lives. That’s why Nimble’s mission is to help schools find and hire amazing educators for every classroom. Founded at Stanford University and backed by Y Combinator, Nimble brings a spirit of innovation to an industry that has often been overlooked by modern tech companies. Our software suite helps practitioners at all levels of the public education system address one of the industry’s most pressing challenges: recruiting life-changing teachers.

Our culture

While some Nimblers are former teachers, others come from companies across the tech and startup world. What unites us is that we find purpose in our mission of ensuring all students have access to amazing teachers. We have a culture of high ownership and ambitious goals, complemented by employee trust and flexibility, which allows us to move efficiently without burnout.

We’re highly invested, not only in the mission, but also in each other. As a fully remote company, we’ve created rituals and traditions that allow us to bond from afar, and we look for teammates who will bring curiosity, creativity, humor, humility, and open-mindedness to work each day.

We’re a woman-founded company and a diverse team that has invested intentionally in creating a workplace where individuals from various backgrounds feel a deep sense of belonging.

Finally, while the innovation culture of Silicon Valley is in our company DNA and we have ambitious goals to transform the education industry, we approach our work through a lens of sustainable growth, rather than growth at all costs. This allows us to solve problems with freedom and creativity, without being constrained by the demands of outside investors.

The role

We're looking for a senior contractor to help tackle some of our most challenging data and platform problems. You'll work directly with our engineering team on high-impact projects with clear outcomes. We want someone who can take an ambiguous problem, design the right system, and ship it fast with AI as part of how they work, while owning the context and the thinking behind those decisions.

Engagement:

• Fully remote contract role
• Ideally 20-30 hrs per week, ideally with 4-6 hours of overlap with US Central time
• 3-6 months with potential to extend or convert to full time later

You'll work on:

• Data pipelines at scale. Design, build and operate pipelines that ingest messy, high-volume data from external sources, integrate with third-party platforms, and keep it all reliable.
• Data quality and modeling. Find where data breaks and build systems that fix problems at the root instead of patching them by hand.
• Data-intensive products. Help shape the architecture behind products that state and district leaders rely on to make decisions.
• Services that last. Build and extend services within our service-oriented architecture, following the same standards for design, testing and code quality as the rest of the team.
• Engineering quality. Write well-tested, maintainable code, review others' work, and leave every system you touch simpler than you found it.

Qualifications

Qualified applicants will have most or all of the following:

• 7+ years building production software, with a track record of leading complex projects from design to launch.
• Strong data modeling skills. You know how to design schemas that hold up as the product and the data grow.
• Strong distributed systems fundamentals: queues, retries, idempotency, concurrency, failure modes, and how to reason about them.
• Experience building services in a service-oriented architecture: clear boundaries, well-defined APIs, and services that are easy to test, deploy and own.
• Hands-on experience building and operating modern ETL/ELT pipelines and third-party integrations at scale, such as web scraping, partner APIs, data feeds or webhooks.
• Strong programming skills (we work in TypeScript and have a legacy monolith in Python) and solid SQL (Postgres preferred), including query performance and indexing.
• You use AI tools (Claude Code, Cursor, agents, custom workflows) as a core part of how you build, and you know how to keep quality high while moving fast with them.
• A high bar for code quality and a strong pace. You write well-tested, readable code, give thoughtful reviews, and communicate clearly and proactively, especially async.

Nice to haves:

• Experience with Cloudflare Workers or other serverless and edge platforms.
• Experience building analytics products or data warehouses.
• Experience with CI/CD and observability tools like CircleCI, Datadog or Sentry.
• Experience building LLM-powered features such as extraction, classification or agentic workflows.
• Background in edtech, government, or the public sector.

If you're excited about this work but don't check every box, we still want to hear from you. We're building a team with a mix of backgrounds and perspectives, and we especially encourage people from groups underrepresented in tech to apply. If you need any accommodations during the process, just let us know.