Senior AI Software Engineer
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Summary
Senior engineer builds and validates prototypes with U.S. school districts, turning customer pain into maintainable operational software using AI-assisted workflows.
Location: Remote (US) | Travel: 5-10%, regular onsite time with districts | Reports to: Director of Engineering
Who We Are
At Informed K12, we believe that operational excellence in school districts is one of the highest-leverage investments in public education. Our technology builds capacity for administrators and gives time and resources back to teachers by fixing one of the most overlooked problems in education: the slow, fragmented processes and workflows that carry a district's most critical work.
We have been expanding our impact since 2012, building the product depth, customer relationships, and operational track record required for this work. For engineering, this is a build phase: we are invested in growing the team and giving senior engineers room to define how AI changes the way software gets built here. Much of K-12 software grows by acquisition and cost-cutting. We grow by deeply understanding district pain and building for the future of K12 operations.
Why This Role Exists
This role really focuses on software engineering as the discipline of learning by building, with real customers, with real data, without forcing premature abstractions back into the core platform.
Informed K12 builds operational software for U.S. school districts. You will be a part of a small group that builds new product hypotheses alongside our most adventurous customers, validates them with real data, and decides what graduates into the broader platform. You will be a senior IC at the heart of that team.
If you have shipped prototypes alongside customers under real ambiguity, retired your own projects on purpose, and have a clear understanding of what it means to use code to learn but carefully consider the cost of maintenance over time, then you are a great fit for this role.
Why The Problem is Interesting
Our engineering challenges aren't about scale. They're about domain depth and distilling complexity into elegant primitives that model how districts actually work. School districts are among the most process-dense institutions in the country: every workflow encodes board policy, bargaining agreements, and state law, and every district encodes them differently. The hard problem is finding the primitives underneath 100 apparently-unique processes — deciding what's essential variance and what's cruft and unnecessary complexity, without breaking workflows where a mistake means someone doesn't get paid. If you find that kind of complexity more interesting than another distributed-systems problem, you'll like it here.
What You'll Own
- Customer-embedded prototyping with 3-5 forward-looking school districts, building product hypotheses with real data
- The judgment call about what graduates — which prototypes earn their way into the core platform, which stay sandboxed, which get sunset
- A working partnership with our Senior Director of Product Management and Director of Customer Success - you are a peer. We expect you to understand the work and pain of our districts as deeply as they do.
- Prototypes that produce real revenue opportunities, not just demos
- A small set of high-stakes new product directions we will share with you under NDA
What You'll Be Working on in the First Year
- 2-3 customer-validated prototypes built alongside named district partners
- A working operating model for our forward-deployed practice — how we select customers, how we measure learning, how we decide what graduates
What We Are Looking For
- 10+ years of engineering experience including significant time spent embedded with customers — solutions engineering, forward-deployed engineering, founding-engineer-at-an-enterprise-startup, or equivalent
- Has converted at least one demo into recurring revenue and can tell the story of which customer behavior changed your hypothesis
- Has retired your own prototypes on purpose, when the learning was complete, before sunk cost set in
- Comfortable shipping throwaway code to learn — and disciplined about not pulling it into core systems prematurely
- Has used Cursor, Claude Code, Codex, or equivalent in real production work and can articulate where you let the model lead and where you stop and rewrite
- Strong written and verbal communication — you will write decision memos that we read, and you will lead customer conversations without just telling customers what they want to hear
- Holds substantive opinions on software design and forward-deployed practice
What Will Excite Us
- You have a substantive opinion on why "forward-deployed engineering" is having a moment, and where the trend is over-hyped
- You have prior K-12, public-sector, or regulated-industry experience — or a story about what you would learn fast in a regulated context
- You have a point of view on the future of AI-assisted enterprise software that goes beyond the obvious
How We Work
- Small enough that you'll have real impact, large enough that the work matters
- AI-assisted by default — we expect senior engineers to design the loop, not just ride it
- Direct, low-ceremony, high-context communication
- Customers are not abstractions — you will be in their offices, in their data, in their words
- We have a written strategy. We argue with it, in writing, in real time
- Frontier Force has its own operating model: small team, customer-attached, accountable for learning rather than feature throughput
How to Apply
Every application is personally reviewed by a member of our team. Include the following in your application:
- A 1-paragraph answer to: "What is the most important hypothesis you abandoned in the field, and what changed your mind?"
- A link to writing or code we can read (any format)
- Optional: a 2-3 sentence take on what you think is overrated or misunderstood about Forward Deployed Engineers
How to Prepare
We want to hear you reflect on your career and experiences. We want to see how your beliefs on engineering, product, and teams have evolved over time and how you put those beliefs into practice. We are not testing whether you've read a particular reading list. We are testing whether you've internalized the ideas — and whether you can articulate where you disagree with them. If conversations about prototyping discipline, reversible vs. irreversible decisions (type-1 vs. type-2), definite optimism, AI-on-the-loop engineering, and the difference between forward-deployed engineering and consulting are familiar territory, you'll feel at home in our process.
Benefits and Perks
- Healthcare coverage: 100% for employees, 35% for dependents.
- Uncapped PTO.
- Monthly productivity allowance (co-working space, coffee shop, working lunch).
- New hire stipend for remote office setup.
- Monthly wifi reimbursement.
- Annual personal office supply stipend.
- Skills development stipend (begins at 1-year anniversary).
If you want to help school districts win, not just adopt software, we want to get to know you.
Informed K12 is an equal-opportunity employer. We do not require degrees. We do require evidence.
