Contract: Senior Software Engineer - Newsela Writing Team

Why You'll Love This Role: 

We're hiring a Senior Software Engineer Contractor for the Writing product team. This is a hands-on role on a small, full-stack team building AI-powered learning experiences. You'll ship across the product end-to-end: frontend, backend, data, and the LLM-driven services that sit behind our assessment features.

We work AI-native. Coding agents (Claude Code, Copilot, Cursor) are how this team builds, reviews, and operates, and we expect senior engineers to do more than use them. The strongest people on the team invest in the harness itself: writing skills, hooks, and custom workflows that make the next person faster.

A Senior Individual Contributor with a high agency. Someone who:

• Owns the full lifecycle. Takes a problem from vague ask to shipped, monitored, and stable in production. Comfortable shaping scope without heavy PM guidance.
• Raises issues early. Catches risks, design drift, and brittle patterns before they reach production - in their own work and in review. Doesn't wait to be asked.
• Picks up slack outside their lane. Steps into incidents, jumps into a teammate's PR queue, and drives an unowned problem when priorities shift.
• Builds in the AI-native space with judgment. Uses agents as a daily driver, knows their failure modes, and pushes the team's practice forward - not just their own.
• Drives delivery. Active in planning and grooming, pushes back on under-specified work, communicates trade-offs clearly to engineering and product partners.

• Ship full-stack features with measurable product impact.
• Provide substantive code review, architectural feedback, not just approvals.
• Serve as a first responder for production issues (within working hours): triage, root cause, and preventive measures recommendations.
• Improve the team's engineering practice over time: tooling, agentic workflows, technical standards, and documentation that lives where work happens.
• Translate product requirements into a technical approach and communicate the reasoning.

• 5+ years building production web applications, with a strong full-stack range (modern React/TypeScript frontends and a typed or Pythonic backend).
• Track record of owning ambiguous problems end-to-end and shipping with measurable impact.
• Substantive code review history - examples of catching architectural issues.
• Active daily use of AI coding agents (Claude Code, Copilot, Cursor, or similar) with a clear point of view on where they help, where they hurt, and how to keep their output reviewable.
• Comfort with production debugging across the stack: traces, logs, profiling, the unglamorous parts.
• Strong async written communication: clear PR descriptions, sharp Slack, sharp specs.

• Experience extending or building on agentic developer tooling (custom agents, skills, hooks, MCP servers, eval harnesses).
• Background in rich text editing, document collaboration, or LLM-backed product features.

All offers of employment are contingent upon the successful completion of a background check as part of our pre-employment process.

Please note that given the nature of the contract, this role will not be eligible to participate in company-sponsored benefits.

Newsela is a leading education technology company dedicated to meaningful classroom learning for every student. We deliver integrated, AI-powered solutions designed to unlock student engagement, empower teachers, and drive meaningful learning outcomes. Our suite of products supports knowledge and skill development, writing practice, daily instruction, assessment, and data-informed decision-making across K–12 classrooms. Grounded in learning science research, Newsela’s solutions integrate content, assessment, and analytics to help educators track progress, understand student outcomes, and deliver high-impact instruction that supports every learner.

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