Engineer

ParentSquare is a rapidly growing Santa Barbara-based company that’s changing the way schools and parents communicate every day. Sound simple? We strive to keep it that way! Our mission is to give schools the power to incredibly enhance family engagement for all students. ParentSquare and RemindHub, our flagship products, serve over 22 million students and drive our mission by providing unified communications tools -forms, sign ups, payments, RSVPs, direct messaging, language translations, chat and more. Remind Chat, our free product, reaches over 80% of K-12 students, providing a safe and easy-to-use platform for direct communication between teachers and families. And our latest innovation, SmartSites, offers state-of-the-art websites for school districts, enhancing their online presence and accessibility.

We are not just creating a product; we are creating empowered educators and engaged parents to improve the lives of all students. We are passionate advocates for our customers and for our employees and we invite you to join us on this exciting journey.

Who we’re looking for:

ParentSquare is seeking an AI Platform Engineer to build the tools that let the rest of our company do more with AI. This is a new team and a new role, and you would be one of its first engineers.

This is not a traditional software engineering job. There is no fixed stack - you will choose tools per problem and be learning unfamiliar ones regularly. Much of the work arrives from non-engineering teams as a vague request, closer to “can AI fix this?” than to a spec, and a large part of the job is working out what is actually worth building. You will spend nearly as much time talking to support, customer success and product people as writing code, most of what you build will be internal and invisible from outside the company, and some of it you will eventually retire.

You should be someone who has genuinely changed how you work using LLMs and agents, and who is equally clear about where they fail. Most importantly, you share our passion for improving the lives of students through communication.

This role will include:

• Build and ship internal and external tools that put LLMs and agents to work for team
• Translate vague requests from non-technical teams into scoped problems - including pushing back when the ask isn't the right thing to build.
• Own adoption, not just delivery: measure whether what you built is used, and fix or retire it when it isn't.
• Evaluate model output for accuracy, cost, and failure modes before it reaches a school.
• Build and maintain features that operate robustly at scale, meeting the security and privacy standards K-12 requires.
• Work within and evolve our existing systems, including our monolith, and participate actively in PR reviews.
• Champion AI development practices across engineering, helping peers find what actually works.
• Contribute to a technical culture focused on clear, simple code and continuous learning.

Our ideal candidate will have the following:

• Professional experience shipping backend services in Ruby, Python, JavaScript/TypeScript, or PHP - we care that you've shipped production code, not which language you shipped it in.
• Fundamentally changed your own workflow using LLMs and AI agents, with specific examples of where they helped and where you caught them being wrong.
• Solid experience building application services on MySQL or PostgreSQL, with an understanding of relational databases beyond standard ORM usage.
• Proficiency building and consuming RESTful APIs.
• Experience deploying, monitoring, and operating services on cloud infrastructure.
• Comfort working from ambiguous requests alongside non-technical stakeholders.
• Bonus points for:
• • Experience with AWS specifically, including Aurora, RDS, or SQS.
  • Experience in distributed systems, or evolving monolithic architectures.
  • A track record of building internal tools that other teams came to depend on.
  • K-12, EdTech, or another domain with meaningful privacy and security constraints.

The perks of working for us are great!

You’ll get your foot in the door as our company continues to grow. We’re big believers in work-life balance and provide:

• Employer-paid health insurance (including dependent coverage)
• An employer-matched 401K retirement savings program from day 1
• Paid Parental Leave
• Stock options
• Health + wellness reimbursements
• PTO that increases each year
• 15 paid holidays, including your birthday!

As a fully remote team, we’ll make sure you have all the tools and equipment you need to make your home office a place where you can thrive.

We're an equal opportunity employer. All applicants will be considered for employment without attention to age, race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, veteran or disability status. We are committed to maintaining a drug-free workplace in compliance with applicable state laws.

The salary range for this role will be $135,000- $185,000 DOE.