Principal Software Engineer

Job Overview:

ExploreK12 Literacy is looking for a Principal Software Engineer who combines deep technical expertise, strong engineering judgment, and hands-on execution.

This role is for an engineer who can get deeply into a complex, mature application, understand how it actually works, and help determine how it should evolve. You will work directly in the code while also helping teams navigate difficult technical decisions, modernization efforts, architectural constraints, and ambiguous engineering problems.

You will be a senior technical leader within the Literacy product area, partnering closely with engineers, engineering leaders, and architects to help shape technical direction across multiple teams and products. You will help shape technical direction, surface risks and tradeoffs, and turn complex problems into practical paths forward. You will also work across product boundaries where shared capabilities or product convergence require coordination with other engineering teams.

Modernization is an important part of this role, but it is not the goal by itself. The goal is to enable the future of the product while making the system easier to understand, change, test, deploy, and operate. Sometimes that means modernizing a system. Sometimes it means integrating with it, isolating it, incrementally replacing part of it, or deliberately leaving it alone.

We are also looking for someone who is fluent in modern AI-assisted software development and interested in applying AI thoughtfully where it can improve engineering effectiveness or create meaningful product value. You do not need to be an AI specialist.

Job Responsibilities:

Solve Difficult Technical Problems

• Get deeply into our applications, codebases, data flows, integrations, dependencies, and operational behavior to understand how the system actually works.
• Investigate complex technical problems through multiple layers of the system until the underlying causes and constraints are understood.
• Turn ambiguous or complicated engineering problems into clear problem statements, options, tradeoffs, and recommended approaches.
• Bring strong technical judgment to decisions involving complexity, risk, customer value, cost, maintainability, team capacity, and future product needs.
• Surface significant technical risks early and take clear, well-supported positions when you believe the organization is heading toward a poor technical outcome.

Remain a Hands-On Engineer

• Contribute meaningful production code and take direct responsibility for technical work where your involvement can have high impact.
• Depending on the needs of the product, own or contribute to projects, features, migrations, prototypes, architectural changes, and difficult engineering investigations.
• Work at both the architecture and implementation levels, moving between system-level reasoning and code-level details as the problem requires.
• Use hands-on involvement to build firsthand understanding of the system rather than operating primarily through architecture documents and reviews.
• Exercise judgment about when personally implementing a solution is the highest-leverage contribution and when enabling another engineer or team will create greater value.

Help Evolve a Mature Product

• Partner with architects and product engineering leaders to understand the current application landscape and help craft practical approaches for its evolution.
• Identify where architectural constraints and technical debt are materially affecting engineering effectiveness or limiting future product capabilities.
• Recommend modernization investments based on evidence, expected value, risk, cost, reversibility, team capacity, and product direction.
• Apply approaches such as incremental replacement, modularization, API enablement, migration, strangler patterns, or parallel adoption when they are appropriate to the problem.
• Help teams decompose significant technical change into achievable increments that reduce risk and produce useful progress.
• Recognize when existing technology is adequate and modernization would create more cost or risk than value.
• Help reduce friction in how engineers understand, change, test, deploy, and operate important parts of the product.
• Contribute to a credible longer-term path for the product's technical evolution rather than treating modernization as a collection of isolated projects.

Provide Principal-Level Technical Leadership

• Be a high-leverage technical partner on important architectural decisions, novel problems, technically risky initiatives, and work with significant cross-product implications.
• Identify architectural constraints, technical risks, and systemic issues that span multiple teams, products, or strategic initiatives, and help drive resolution before they become significant delivery, operational, or customer-impacting problems.
• Work with Product and Design during solution discovery and implementation planning to translate product needs into sound technical approaches and challenge proposed solutions when technical insight reveals a materially better path.
• Partner with architects on broader architectural concerns such as shared capabilities, identity, data, integration patterns, and areas where products increasingly need to work together.
• Influence technical direction across the Literacy product area by helping teams align around shared architectural assumptions, integration approaches, technical standards, and long-term evolution paths.
• Help teams make stronger technical decisions through architectural guidance, decision frameworks, and shared understanding without becoming an approval gate or centralizing decisions around yourself.
• Explain and defend technical recommendations clearly while respecting the accountability of engineering leaders and teams for final decisions and delivery.
• When important technical disagreements cannot be resolved within a team, help make tradeoffs explicit and support escalation to the appropriate engineering leader.

Develop Stronger Technical Leaders

• Intentionally develop senior engineers and technical leads by involving them in difficult technical problems and helping them strengthen their own judgment.
• Coach through design discussions, investigation, pairing, implementation, and code review rather than simply supplying answers.
• Give engineers increasing ownership of difficult technical work so that the organization becomes more capable rather than more dependent on the Principal Engineer.
• Improve technical practices, design discussions, standards, documentation, or engineering forums when doing so addresses a meaningful recurring problem.

Apply AI Practically

• Use modern AI-assisted development tools extensively and thoughtfully as part of your engineering workflow.
• Understand the capabilities and limitations of current AI technologies well enough to reason about where they can and cannot add value.
• Help identify practical opportunities for AI to improve engineering effectiveness or enable useful product capabilities.
• Prototype or contribute to AI-enabled solutions when appropriate, with appropriate attention to privacy, security, quality, cost, and responsible use.
• Help the engineering organization learn from practical AI adoption rather than pursuing AI for its own sake.

Job Requirements:

• 10+ years of professional software engineering experience, including demonstrated experience operating as a senior technical leader on complex software systems. Previous experience with the title of Principal Engineer is not required.
• Demonstrated recent, hands-on experience designing, developing, and supporting production systems using PHP, MySQL, Java, and MS SQL Server at a Principal or Staff Engineer level.
• Exceptional ability to investigate complex technical problems and work through abstractions until you understand what is actually happening.
• Strong application architecture skills, including the ability to reason about codebases, APIs, data models, integrations, dependencies, failure modes, testing, and operational behavior.
• Strong technical judgment and a demonstrated ability to make pragmatic tradeoffs among immediate needs, long-term maintainability, risk, complexity, customer value, cost, and team capacity.
• Experience evolving mature software systems and navigating the realities of long-lived codebases, accumulated technical constraints, and incremental change.
• Experience with modernization or significant system evolution, including knowing when substantial change is justified and when it is not.
• Recent hands-on software engineering experience and the desire to continue contributing meaningful production code.
• Ability to turn ambiguous technical situations into clear problems, options, recommendations, and executable paths.
• Ability to take strong technical positions, communicate the reasoning behind them, and influence decisions without relying on formal authority.
• Experience developing the technical judgment and capabilities of other experienced engineers.
• Practical fluency with modern AI-assisted software development and a working understanding of contemporary AI capabilities, limitations, and development patterns.
• Ability to quickly build a coherent mental model of a complicated application and communicate that model effectively to engineers and leaders.

Preferred Experience:

Experience in any of the following areas can be valuable, but is not required:

• Complex, long-lived application platforms with significant dependencies, integrations, or accumulated technical constraints.
• Incremental modernization, migrations, modularization, or architectural evolution of actively used products.
• Integrating products or systems with different architectures, data models, authentication approaches, or technology stacks.
• Systems involving sensitive data, identity, authentication, privacy, or security concerns.
• Working across product boundaries on shared capabilities or increasingly integrated customer experiences.
• Education technology or other domains with complex customer and operational environments.
• Building or contributing to AI-enabled product capabilities in production.

What Success Looks Like:

Over your first year, success should be visible in both the product and the engineering organization.

Important parts of the system are becoming easier for engineers to understand, change, test, deploy, or operate. The organization has a clearer, credible path for evolving the product's architecture, and meaningful modernization work is underway where it creates real value. Some of that evolution may also unlock product capabilities that were previously difficult or impractical to deliver.

Teams are making more consistent technical decisions across product boundaries because shared architectural assumptions, integration approaches, and long-term technical tradeoffs are understood earlier. Cross-team technical risks are surfaced sooner, and the organization has greater confidence in its technical direction beyond any individual application or team.

Senior engineers and technical leads are taking on increasingly difficult technical problems with stronger judgment and greater independence. Your presence increases the organization's technical capability rather than creating dependency on you.

AI is becoming a practical part of how engineering works, and useful opportunities for AI in the product are being identified and pursued based on customer and business value rather than novelty.

Why Work for Us

When you join ExploreK12™, you become part of a mission to help educators unlock brighter futures for every student.

As a trusted leader in educational technology, we serve more than 17 million students and educators across 150+ countries with innovative, research-backed learning solutions that truly make a difference. Our flagship products—Gizmos™, Raz-Plus®, and Reflex™—are beloved by educators and students alike for being as practical and effective as they are fun.

To learn more about our organization and the exciting work we do, visit www.ExploreK12.com.

Remote First Work Environment 

Our Remote First approach gives employees the flexibility and trust they need to effectively balance work with life. It creates a culture in which all employees are valued and where success is measured in results. It allows us to work collaboratively, inclusively and for greater positive impact, regardless of our individual locations.

If you will be working remotely, either occasionally or on a permanent basis, you must have a reliable internet connection through a cable or fiber-optic broadband service with minimum speeds of 10 Mbps download and 5 Mbps upload.

The successful candidate will be expected to actively participate in video-based interviews during the recruiting process and ongoing virtual meetings with their camera on, as part of their role. To maintain confidentiality and ensure a fair evaluation process, the use of note-taking tools, reference materials, or AI-powered tools (including generative AI, language models, or similar technologies) during interviews or other selection activities is prohibited unless prior written approval has been obtained from the People Experience team. If you require an exception for medical, accessibility, or other reasons, please contact your Talent Acquisition team member to discuss accommodations in advance.

As part of our Remote-First benefits, Cambium offers reimbursement to help cover the cost of setting up your home or remote office.

An Equal Opportunity Employer

We are dedicated to fostering a culture that celebrates unique backgrounds, ideas, and experiences. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without discrimination on the basis of race, color, age, religion, sex (including pregnancy, gender, gender identity/expression, or sexual orientation), national origin, protected veteran status, disability, or genetic information (including family medical history).

We will provide reasonable accommodations for qualified individuals with disabilities.  You may request an accommodation during the recruiting process with your Talent Acquisition team member.