Forward Deployed Engineer

About the Role

We’re seeking a Forward Deployed Engineer to make Edia work inside the complex technical and operational environments of large school districts.

You’ll work directly with district IT teams, curriculum leaders, and operational staff to understand their systems and workflows, integrate their data, and customize Edia’s products to meet their needs.

This role sits between Customer Success Engineering and product engineering. You won’t simply collect requirements and hand them to another team. You’ll inspect unfamiliar systems, design solutions, implement integrations and product extensions, debug failures, and operate what you ship. You’ll also recognize when a district-specific request reveals a reusable capability that belongs in the core platform.

What You’ll Do

Embed with districts

• Work directly with district IT, data, curriculum, and operations teams to understand their systems, constraints, and existing workflows.
• Turn loosely defined customer needs into concrete technical designs, implementation plans, and production software.
• Own the technical relationship from initial discovery through integration, customization, launch, and stabilization.

Build integrations and custom solutions

• Build and operate integrations with PowerSchool, Infinite Campus, Synergy, Clever, ClassLink, and other district systems.
• Implement REST API integrations, SFTP pipelines, SSO and rostering flows, data transformations, validation systems, and backfills.
• Extend Edia’s products with district-specific workflows, internal tools, reports, interfaces, and automations.
• Ship full-stack functionality when a successful deployment requires changes across backend services, data models, and user interfaces.
• Safely migrate and reconcile sensitive, inconsistent, and incomplete district data.

Own production outcomes

• Debug schema mismatches, authentication problems, API limitations, data-quality failures, and unexpected customer environments.
• Build appropriate testing, observability, reconciliation, retry, and recovery mechanisms for every integration.
• Remain accountable through go-live rather than treating code completion as the finish line.
• Balance immediate customer needs with maintainability, security, and the long-term health of the platform.

Improve the core platform

• Identify repeated customer problems and turn one-off solutions into reusable platform capabilities.
• Build integration frameworks, configuration systems, implementation tooling, and operational playbooks that let Edia support districts faster.
• Partner closely with Product and Engineering to influence roadmap based on what you learn in the field.
• Exercise judgment about when to customize, when to generalize, and when to push back on a fragile approach.

What We’re Looking For

Essential qualifications

• A bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a closely related rigorous technical field.
• 4+ years of hands-on software engineering experience.
• Strong programming fundamentals and the ability to become productive quickly in an unfamiliar codebase.
• Experience building production backend services and data integrations using REST APIs, data pipelines, and asynchronous workflows.
• Strong debugging skills across application code, data, infrastructure, and third-party systems.
• Experience with cloud infrastructure.
• Ability to design a system, implement it, and remain accountable for its behavior in production.
• Excellent communication with both engineers and nontechnical stakeholders.
• Comfort operating in ambiguous customer environments where the real problem must be discovered rather than simply specified.

What sets you apart

• You enjoy working directly with users and domain experts.
• You naturally investigate the surrounding workflow instead of implementing the first requested feature literally.
• You can move between a district meeting, an unfamiliar API, a production incident, and a code review without losing the thread.
• You have strong judgment about which customer requests should become reusable product capabilities.
• You care deeply about correctness, maintainability, and the operational details that determine whether a system actually works.
• You seek out important problems and drive them to completion without waiting for a fully formed specification.

Especially valuable experience

• Node.js and TypeScript.
• AWS.
• React or other full-stack product development.
• SIS, LMS, rostering, SSO, education-data, or public-sector integrations.
• Forward-deployed engineering, technical consulting, implementation engineering, or early-stage startup work.