Principal Engineer
Location: Remote
Reports to: Chief Product and Technology Officer
Employment Type: Exempt Full-Time

About StrongMind

StrongMind is a remote-first education and technology company on a mission to transform learning for students, families, and educators across the country. For more than 25 years, we’ve partnered with schools and districts to deliver innovative, student-centered learning experiences powered by technology, compassion, and bold thinking.

We believe education should be flexible, human, and built for real life. That belief shapes how we design our products, support our partners, and work together as a team. At StrongMind, you’ll find smart people doing meaningful work, a culture rooted in trust and accountability, and leaders who genuinely care about both outcomes and people.

The Team You Will Join

You’ll be part of StrongMind’s Engineering team, working closely with Product, Architecture, and Platform teams to evolve our learning platform into a cohesive, scalable online school system. You’ll collaborate with senior engineers, Product Managers, and technology leaders across multiple product areas.

The team culture is highly collaborative, pragmatic, and mission-driven. You’ll have opportunities to shape architectural direction, mentor engineers, and lead complex cross-team initiatives while helping StrongMind deliver reliable, secure, and extensible technology for schools and students nationwide.

The Difference You Will Make

In this role, your work will directly impact students, educators, and product teams by strengthening the architecture, scalability, and reliability of StrongMind’s core platform.

You’ll help transform our system into a more cohesive, extensible, and resilient learning platform—guiding technical direction, enabling multi-team delivery, and ensuring that what we build today remains adaptable for the future. Your leadership will reduce complexity, improve engineering velocity, and support meaningful innovation in digital education.

A Typical Day Looks Like

While no two days are exactly the same, you can expect to:

• Define and evolve architecture, service boundaries, and integration patterns across your product domain
• Lead technical direction and delivery for complex, cross-team initiatives or platform changes
• Partner with Product Managers to shape large or ambiguous ideas into incremental, shippable plans
• Contribute hands-on within the Ruby/Rails codebase on critical paths, refactors, integrations, and performance work
• Mentor engineers and influence technical decisions across teams
• Participate in architecture reviews and help guide organization-wide technical standards
• Balance short-term delivery goals with long-term system health and evolution
• This position requires availability to work core business hours of 8:00 AM to 5:00 PM Arizona time, Monday through Friday

This role balances deep technical execution, system-level thinking, and strategic leadership and is well-suited for someone who enjoys solving complex problems, guiding architecture, and enabling teams to build durable systems.

Your Expertise Includes

We’re looking for someone who brings:

• Extensive professional software engineering experience building and evolving production systems at scale
• Deep expertise in Ruby on Rails, including framework internals, performance tuning, background jobs, data modeling, and secure coding
• Strong full-stack capabilities (HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and at least one modern front-end framework such as React, Vue, or similar)
• Proven experience designing and evolving complex architectures (monolith, modular monolith, or service-oriented systems)
• Strong API and integration design experience, including RESTful services and external system integrations
• Advanced relational database skills (schema design, indexing, query optimization, large-scale migrations)
• Experience with cloud platforms and DevOps fundamentals (AWS/GCP/Azure, CI/CD, containerization)
• Excellent communication and technical leadership in a remote environment
• Demonstrated ability to mentor engineers and influence across multiple teams

Bonus points if you also have:

• Experience with AI/LLM systems or AI-enabled product capabilities
• Observability tooling experience (Datadog, New Relic, Prometheus, OpenTelemetry)
• Infrastructure-as-code or orchestration experience (Kubernetes, Terraform, Helm)
• EdTech experience or integrations with LMS/SIS platforms
• Experience in compliance- or security-sensitive domains (education, healthcare, finance)

Our Commitment to Inclusion & Belonging

At StrongMind, we believe the best ideas come from bringing together people with different perspectives, experiences, and ways of thinking. A diverse and inclusive workplace fuels creativity, strengthens collaboration, and helps us build better solutions for the students, families, and communities we serve.

We are committed to welcoming a broad range of talent and encouraging all qualified individuals to apply. We strive to create an environment where everyone feels a sense of belonging and is empowered to contribute, grow, and do meaningful work.

How We’ll Take Care of You

We believe that when people feel supported, they do their best work. At StrongMind, your well-being isn’t a perk—it’s part of our culture.

Our commitment to you includes:

• A competitive total compensation package, including medical, dental, vision, and voluntary benefits
• Well-being that works for real life—from an on-site gym, virtual wellness programs, and wellness coaching to flexible work options for select roles, because your well-being fuels your brilliance
• Unlimited PTO for exempt roles, plus additional “life happens” days when you need flexibility
• A fully paid holiday week off at Christmas, so you can truly rest, reset, and reconnect
• Recognition and rewards that celebrate birthdays, meaningful milestones, legendary work, and community service hours that let you give back
• Quarterly Town Halls that keep communication transparent, honest, and human
• Annual social events and traditions we genuinely look forward to—like Halloween celebrations, Wellness Fairs, and other moments that bring our community together

We’re intentional about building a workplace where people feel valued, connected, and empowered to thrive—at work and beyond.

Additional Info

We welcome all qualified candidates eligible to work in the United States. At this time, we are unable to sponsor visas.

We are proud to be an Equal Opportunity Employer and provide consideration to all applicants regardless of race, religion, color, sex, gender, national origin, age, veteran status, marital status, or disability protected by law.