Staff Backend Engineer

The Role

As a Staff Backend Engineer at Apptegy, you will provide technical leadership and architectural direction for the backend systems that power our platform serving thousands of school districts nationwide. You will be responsible for designing, scaling, and evolving highly reliable services and APIs, with a focus on long-term system health, performance, and security.

This role goes beyond individual execution. As a Staff Engineer, you will influence technical direction across teams, partner closely with product and engineering leadership, and help define how we build and scale software at Apptegy. While you will remain hands-on, your impact will be measured by the strength, resilience, and clarity of the systems and teams you help guide.

What You’ll Do

Technical Leadership & Architecture

• Own and evolve backend system architecture, ensuring scalability, performance, reliability, and security across product domains.
  
  
• Design and implement complex backend services, APIs, and data models primarily using Ruby on Rails.
  
  
• Lead technical discovery and design for large, ambiguous initiatives, identifying risks and tradeoffs early.
  
  
• Establish and promote architectural standards and best practices across teams.
  
  
• Proactively identify system bottlenecks and technical debt, driving sustainable, long-term improvements.
  
  

Strategic Execution

• Partner with product managers, engineering managers, and business stakeholders to align technical solutions with company goals.
  
  
• Translate high-level business initiatives into clear technical strategies and execution plans.
  
  
• Break down large, multi-team efforts into sequenced, actionable work while maintaining a long-term architectural vision.
  
  
• Advocate for technical investments that improve platform stability, developer velocity, and customer experience.
  
  

Mentorship & Engineering Excellence

• Serve as a technical mentor for senior and mid-level engineers, supporting growth through guidance and example.
  
  
• Lead code and design reviews with a focus on maintainability, performance, and operational quality.
  
  
• Help shape engineering culture by reinforcing strong testing, documentation, and observability practices.
  
  
• Influence hiring and onboarding by helping set and uphold a high technical bar.
  
  

Collaboration & Communication

• Collaborate across engineering, product, and infrastructure teams to deliver cohesive backend solutions.
  
  
• Clearly communicate complex technical decisions and their implications to both technical and non-technical audiences.
  
  
• Foster alignment by sharing context, tradeoffs, and architectural rationale across teams.
  
  

What You’ll Bring

Experience & Technical Skills

• 8+ years of professional software development experience, with a strong focus on backend systems.
  
  
• Deep expertise in Ruby on Rails and building large-scale, production backend applications.
  
  
• Proven experience designing scalable APIs, service-oriented architectures, and data models.
  
  
• Strong knowledge of relational databases (e.g., PostgreSQL) and performance optimization techniques.
  
  
• Experience leading technical initiatives that span multiple teams or product areas.
  
  
• Solid understanding of system reliability, monitoring, and incident response in production environments.
  
  

Behavioral Competencies

• Ownership: Takes responsibility for outcomes, not just implementation, and follows initiatives through to completion.
  
  
• Systems Thinking: Considers long-term impact and cross-team effects when making technical decisions.
  
  
• Adaptability & Curiosity: Embraces evolving requirements and actively seeks to learn new technologies and approaches.
  
  
• Problem Solving: Approaches complex challenges with a pragmatic, solutions-focused mindset.
  
  

What Makes You Stand Out

• Experience with cloud platforms (e.g., AWS, Google Cloud).
  
  
• Experience with database and infrastructure technologies (e.g., PostgreSQL, Redis).
  
  
• Knowledge of DevOps practices and tools (e.g., CI/CD, Docker, Kubernetes).
  
  
• Experience working on platform, shared services, or high-scale SaaS systems.
• Experience in the education technology sector.