The posting
Rockstar is recruiting for the nation’s leading school choice advocacy organization. The organization works to empower families, especially lower-income families, with the freedom to choose the best K-12 education for their children. It advocates at the state and national levels for policies that let education funding follow students, connects parents with resources to make informed choices, and develops the next generation of school choice leaders. Its affiliated national scholarship granting organization is building the national platform to raise billions of new dollars for K-12 scholarships. The Education Freedom Tax Credit (EFTC) is poised to become the largest new philanthropic channel in American education. Beginning January 1, 2027, donors will be able to contribute to scholarship-granting organizations and receive a dollar-for-dollar federal tax credit of up to $1,700. For the first time, the federal tax code stands squarely behind educational opportunity, and the organizations that build the right partnerships now will define how millions of Americans discover and act on it.
Location: Austin, TX (in person)
The Opportunity
This role owns the financial system at the center of the scholarship fund’s platform. The engineer will build new capabilities for that system, manage its accuracy and integrity, develop the allocation algorithms behind it, and deliver the reporting that partners and internal teams rely on, working in person in Austin within a small, cross-functional pod. Because the system connects to payroll, the Partner Portal, and other platforms, the engineer will cross into those systems as needed, which is why this is a full-stack role.
What You Will Own
Ledger & Allocation Algorithms
- Design and build new ledger capabilities and back-end services, from data model to production
- Manage the ledger’s integrity: accurate, auditable records, reconciliation, and transaction processing that holds up under retries and edge cases
- Design, implement, and tune allocation algorithms, documenting the logic and testing edge cases so every result is correct and explainable
- Train, evaluate, and monitor machine learning models where they improve allocation and financial decisions
Reporting & Data
- Build the financial and operational reporting that partners, finance, and leadership rely on
- Write and optimize the SQL, data models, and pipelines behind that reporting, with data-quality checks that catch issues before numbers go out
- Build and maintain APIs and integrations between the ledger and third-party platforms, handling authentication, pagination, rate limits, retries, error handling, and logging
Cross-Platform Delivery
- Extend the ledger into connected platforms, including payroll and the Partner Portal (Next.js / TypeScript / Convex on Vercel), building the front-end and back-end pieces each integration needs
- Partner closely with the Product Manager and finance and operations stakeholders to translate requirements into technical approaches, scope work, identify tradeoffs, and deliver iteratively
- Write well-tested, maintainable code, take an active part in code review, and ship through the team’s CI/CD pipelines with logging and error monitoring in place
- Step in to support other pods and projects as priorities shift
Who You Are
A senior engineer with a back-end, financial-systems mindset who cares that every number reconciles, and who is just as willing to build the screen a feature needs. Specifically:
- Precise: You treat financial data as something that must be correct, traceable, and explainable, and you design systems that make mistakes hard to make.
- AI-native: You architect and direct while AI executes. AI-assisted development isn’t a bonus here; it’s how you already work.
- Versatile: You move from ledger logic to a model training run to a front-end screen as the work demands, and keep others informed without being asked.
What You Bring
- 6+ years of software engineering experience with a strong back-end focus and demonstrated ownership across the full stack
- Hands-on experience building financial systems (ledgers, transaction processing, reconciliation, or payments) where accuracy and auditability matter
- Experience designing and implementing allocation, distribution, or optimization algorithms in production
- Experience training, evaluating, and deploying machine learning models
- Strong SQL skills and relational data modeling, including reporting on financial data
- Strong TypeScript and Node.js back-end experience, with enough React and Next.js to build and extend the front ends your work touches
- Strong API integration experience (authentication, pagination, rate limits, retries, error handling, and logging), including webhooks and server-side events
- Experience in cross-functional product teams and explaining technical tradeoffs to finance and non-technical stakeholders
- Ability to work in person at the Austin, Texas office
Nice to Have
- Hands-on AWS experience (e.g., ECS, Lambda, RDS, IAM, CloudWatch)
- DevOps experience: owning CI/CD pipelines (GitHub Actions), environment management, and deployment tooling
- Infrastructure-as-code experience (e.g., AWS SAM)
- Experience setting up monitoring, logging, and alerting across dev, staging, and production
- Familiarity with payroll systems or fund accounting
Benefits
The organization offers comprehensive health and dental plans, a 401(k) with a 5% match, vacation time, and office closures for the weeks of Christmas and the Fourth of July, among other benefits.
