Full-Stack Engineer, Founding TeachSim Team

The posting

About Us:

TeachSim is building a better way to develop teaching expertise. We believe teachers deserve the same thing we expect in other high skill professions: opportunities to learn, practice, receive meaningful feedback, and improve before the stakes are high.

TeachSim uses AI-enabled simulations, coaching, and classroom feedback to help educators build the specific instructional skills that create rigorous, engaging, and affirming learning environments for students. Teachers can build skill for teaching from high-quality instructional materials in a low-stakes setting, receive immediate, actionable feedback, try again, and then use the same framework to understand and strengthen their instruction in real classrooms.

Our vision is to make high-quality, evidence-based professional learning dramatically more accessible, personalized, and effective so that every teacher has the opportunity to build expertise and every student has access to excellent teaching.

TeachSim is an incubated nonprofit venture at Cambiar Education.

About the Role

TeachSim is hiring its first full-time engineer and third full-time team member. You will be the hands-on technical owner for the platform teachers use to learn, practice, receive feedback, and track progress.

This is an early-stage startup role inside a nonprofit. The work comes with real urgency, ambitious year-one deadlines, shifting requirements, and infrastructure that you will often need to create. It offers unusually broad ownership, direct access to users and decision-makers, and the chance to build technology that helps teachers improve their skills and students experience stronger instruction.

Note: As we are a nonprofit venture, this role does not include equity. Compensation and upside come through salary, mission, and the scope of technical ownership described below.

Reporting to the CEO, you will work closely with our Chief Product Officer and with product designers, researchers, content experts, and implementation partners. You will also partner with contract front-end and back-end engineers. This is not primarily a people-management or expert review role: you will write production code, make architecture decisions, ship full-stack features, and create the technical practices that allow a small blended team to move quickly and responsibly.

Priority consideration will be given to applications submitted by Monday, October 5. Applications will be reviewed on a rolling basis until the position is filled.

What you’ll do:

As a Full-Stack Engineer and part of the founding TeachSim team, you will be accountable for the following:

• Build and ship the product. Own full-stack delivery of reliable, intuitive web experiences, including front-end interfaces, backend services, APIs, authentication and permissions, content delivery, product analytics, and third-party integrations.
• Set a pragmatic technical foundation. Recommend and evolve the technology stack and architecture. Make explicit tradeoffs between speed, cost, flexibility, and future scale; document consequential decisions so others can understand and revisit them.
• Lead a blended engineering team. Help assess and select development partners; translate product outcomes into clear technical plans; scope, sequence, and review work; maintain code quality; and hold front-end and back-end contractors accountable for dependable delivery.
• Partner deeply across product and design. Work with the CPO, product designers, users, and content and research partners from discovery through release. Contribute technical insight early, challenge assumptions constructively, and change your own mind when evidence points to a better answer.
• Build around outcomes, users, and evidence. Participate in continuous discovery with teachers, coaches, and partner organizations. Align on desired outcomes and measures before building, instrument the product, study usage and performance data, and use what we learn to improve or stop features.
• Create fast, disciplined learning loops. Prototype to reduce the riskiest assumptions, ship small increments, and pivot when evidence changes. Establish and maintain automated testing, contract testing, code review, CI/CD, observability, documentation, and incident-response practices proportionate to our stage and stakes - enough that contract engineers can ship confidently and frequently without you in the loop for every change.
• Own integrations and technical partnerships. Lead partner integrations and evaluate build-versus-buy-versus-partner decisions for infrastructure, content management, analytics, authentication, AI services, and other capabilities required by our roadmap.
• Protect sensitive data. Design privacy and security into the architecture and delivery process, especially for educator and classroom data. Establish sensible access controls, data retention and governance practices, vendor reviews, backups, monitoring, and a practical path toward the compliance expectations of schools and districts.
• Use AI thoughtfully. Use modern AI-assisted development tools to improve engineering speed and quality, and partner with product colleagues to integrate AI-enabled features where they create demonstrated user value. Bring curiosity about AI alongside sound judgment about reliability, bias, privacy, safety, and cost.
• Communicate clearly. Translate technical risks and choices for non-technical colleagues, surface constraints early, give realistic delivery forecasts, and make it easy for the full team to participate in high-quality decisions.

What We're Looking For:

You have:

• 3-6+ years of professional software engineering experience, with substantial hands-on ownership across both modern front-end and backend systems, and a track record of shipping user-facing products to production - including integrations with third-party platforms you depend on but don’t control
• Experience operating in an early-stage company, new venture, or similarly ambiguous environment — making architecture decisions, building core infrastructure, and still writing production code yourself.
• Led work delivered by yourself and contract or distributed engineers (ideally both front-end and backend), and can speak concretely to how you scoped work, reviewed technical quality, managed dependencies, and improved delivery.
• A strong product orientation: you seek direct exposure to users, define outcomes and success measures before committing to solutions, instrument what you ship, and use qualitative and quantitative evidence to make decisions.
• Experience building with sensitive or regulated data — designing access controls, data retention policies, and vendor/security reviews from the start of a product, not bolted on later. This could come from education data (FERPA, COPPA), healthcare (HIPAA), financial services, or another regulated or high-trust environment.
• Strong communication skills: you translate technical ideas plainly for non-technical colleagues, invite disagreement, and collaborate with curiosity and humility.

Nice to have:

• Experience shipping AI-enabled, user-facing features (deep AI/ML model-development expertise is not required).
• Experience with media processing pipelines, including video uploads, with attention to processing time, reliability, and per-job processing cost.
• Direct experience with district security reviews, SOC 2, or comparable compliance processes in education specifically.
• Experience in K–12 education, educator professional learning, simulations, learning platforms, or classroom video.

You're motivated by TeachSim's mission and clear-eyed about the tradeoffs of joining a nonprofit startup: broad ownership, high urgency, limited infrastructure, and meaningful impact.

What year one success looks like:

• You establish a coherent architecture, stack, development workflow, and security baseline that support rapid iteration without creating avoidable fragility.
• You scope work for and support contract contract engineers while remaining a high-leverage individual contributor.
• You lead the team to on-time delivery and provide successful support for multiple 2027 research pilots with real users
• Product and engineering decisions are grounded in defined outcomes, instrumented metrics, user evidence, and explicit technical tradeoffs.
• Non-technical teammates understand the state of the product, delivery risks, and key technical decisions—and trust that concerns will be surfaced early.

What you'll get:

• Salary range of $140k-160k per year depending on experience
• Comprehensive medical, dental, vision benefits
• Paid vacation and sick time, plus organizationally-observed holidays throughout the year
• Access to optional benefits such as 401(k) Retirement Plan, Employee Assistance Program (EAP), HSA/FSA, pet insurance, etc.
• Stipends to partially cover phone and internet costs, home office set-up, and wellness
• Team retreats and meetings during the year to meet your teammates or see our work in-person
• A motivated, dedicated team that cares about improving education and public data to drive better outcomes for students, especially those in underserved communities
• A highly-collaborative environment with opportunities to learn from and with others across a range of expertise and backgrounds
• A flexible work culture that is human-centered and supports your growth

Our Core Values:

We’re committed to living our organization's core values:

• CREATE 🌎 We create to make a transformative difference in the world. We are eternally optimistic and develop game-changing solutions.
• LOVE ❤️ We believe in the tremendous talent and human potential of all; we want to discover, engage, and celebrate everyone’s unique “superpowers.” We seek out and lean into eclectic ideas, joyful debates, and direct feedback.
• GROW 🌱 We have an insatiable curiosity, love big challenges, and aren't afraid to fail. We accelerate growth and impact so change agents and change efforts reach their fullest potential.
• LAUGH 😄 We laugh often and out loud; creativity is best fostered when we are having fun! We defer judgment so we can all laugh, dance, sing, and express "like no one is watching."
• DARE 🚀 We dare to dream big, take bold action, and challenge the impossible. We embrace risk, push boundaries, and step into the unknown with strength and courage, knowing that growth lies beyond comfort.

Work environment:

Although our team works remotely, you are expected to engage in overnight travel at least 2x throughout the year to various US cities to meet up with other team members (in-person retreats, other program-related meetings and events), and be ready to play an active role in contributing to our collaborative, inclusive culture.

We’re looking for applicants who are comfortable working remotely and who have experience successfully collaborating with team members across different time zones. Your core working days and hours will be M-F from 8am-6pm, with the ability to flex according to workload, scheduled calls and in-person/virtual meetings.

About Cambiar Education:

Founded in 2016 as the first K-12 nonprofit venture studio, Cambiar Education saw untapped potential in the marketplace that could change the world of education - an opportunity to foster and advance radical, innovative ideas that massively accelerate student success for all. Since then, Cambiar has propelled over 140 game-changing ventures that operate at the speed of innovation, cultivated a portfolio of bold and visionary leaders, and built a connected community anchored in a commitment to creating and scaling solutions that center all students. As a member of the Cambiar Education team, you will help change the marketplace for education innovation to prove undeniably that every student can succeed and thrive.

Our Equal Opportunity Employer Commitment:

At Cambiar Education, we believe everyone can make a positive impact, and that a range of perspectives and experiences strengthens our team. We are committed to building an agile, engaging environment where every team member can do their best work, the foundation for creating life-changing impact for one million youth.

Cambiar Education is an Equal Opportunity Employer. We are committed to providing equal employment opportunities to all employees and applicants. This policy extends to all aspects of our employment practices including, but not limited to, recruiting, hiring, promotions, transfers, compensation, benefits, training, leaves of absence, and other terms and conditions of employment.