Staff Software Engineer

ApplyBoard simplifies the study abroad search, application, and acceptance process by connecting international students, recruitment partners, and educational institutions on one intuitive and personalized platform. ApplyBoard is a mission-driven, hyper-growth organization. It has been attracting dedicated individuals for more than eight years who are inspired every day to break down barriers to international education and take their careers to new heights at a company that will invest in their career growth. Our six core values are our compass in our mission to Educate the World and the foundation of our unique company culture. As an organization built on a foundation of diversity, it’s important that our team members are representative of the students from more than 150 countries that we support.

The Opportunity:

ApplyBoard is seeking a highly skilled Staff Software Engineer to join our application processing team in the organization.

As a Staff Backend Engineer on this team, you won’t just write code; you’ll architect the future of how ApplyBoard manages critical information and processes applications at scale. You will be a technical leader, responsible for designing and helping architect complex systems, and ensuring the highest code quality through extensive code reviews.

What you’ll be doing every day:

• Architect & Build: Lead the design, development, and evolution of scalable, high-performance backend services and APIs crucial to application processing and institutional data management.
• Technical Leadership: Provide technical guidance and mentorship to engineers, elevating the team’s capabilities and fostering a culture of engineering excellence.
• Drive Quality & Improvement: Champion best practices in coding, testing, and deployment. Identify and implement improvements to existing systems through refactoring, optimization, and strategic enhancements.
• Collaborate & Influence: Work closely with product managers, designers, and cross-functional teams to translate complex requirements into robust technical solutions. Effectively communicate technical decisions and trade-offs.
• Innovate & Strategize: Research, evaluate, and advocate for new technologies, patterns, and tools that enhance our platform’s capabilities and developer experience. Contribute to strategic build-vs-buy decisions.

What you bring to the table:

• Proven Technical Leadership: Demonstrated experience architecting and delivering complex, scalable, commercial web applications, ideally across various domains.
• Deep Backend Expertise: Extensive knowledge of software design patterns, architectural paradigms (e.g., microservices, SOA), APIs (RESTful), databases (Relational, NoSQL), and messaging systems. You understand the trade-offs inherent in technical choices.
• Mentorship & Influence: A natural ability to guide and inspire fellow engineers, fostering collaboration and constructively influencing technical direction.
• Exceptional Communication: You can articulate complex technical concepts clearly to both technical and non-technical audiences. (We mean it!)
• Ownership & Craftsmanship: A deep sense of pride in building high-quality, reliable, and maintainable software that delights users.
• Agile Acumen: Experience implementing and championing effective Agile technical practices (TDD, CI/CD, etc.) within engineering teams.

Ideally, you also have experience with many of:

• Developing and maintaining products that are used by many thousands or millions of people.
• Practical experience building and using GenAI applications.
• High-growth start-up or scale-up environments.
• EdTech, eCommerce, CRM or content-management software.
• Ruby, Rails, React, Node.js, Typescript, or Python.
• A variety of databases (relational and non-relational), ORM frameworks and their alternatives.
• Microservices or SOA; RESTful APIs.
• AWS, Docker, Kubernetes.
• DevOps, Observability, Infrastructure as Code.

About ApplyBoard

ApplyBoard empowers students around the world to access the best education. With more than 1,000,000 students from over 150 countries helped with their journey in less than a decade, we are just getting started.

ApplyBoard’s 1,200 global team members in 30 countries assist students and our 1,500 partner institutions by empowering the international student sector with innovative technology and insights. As a five-time consecutive Deloitte Fast 50 and Fast 500 ranked company, ApplyBoard is growing and scaling like few other companies. On top of our strong growth, our people are growing personally and professionally. ApplyBoard India was Great Place to Work Institute (India) certified for outstanding employee experience and workplace culture.

Thank you for your interest in joining the ApplyBoard Team and being part of our mission to Educate the World. While we are lucky to attract a high level of interest in each of our roles, only qualified applicants will be contacted and selected for an interview.

ApplyBoard welcomes and encourages applications from people with disabilities. Accommodations are available upon request for candidates in all aspects of the hiring and selection process.