Staff Software Engineer

Must work from one of the following states: AZ, CA, FL, MD, ME, MI, MO, NV, NY, OK, OR, SC, TX, UT, WA, WY.

About Aeries:

Aeries is a software company with a variety of products, including a Student Information System (SIS) used by districts and schools across California and Texas. Our mission is to deliver datadriven, intuitive, and innovative solutions that empower communities to advance student success. Our engineering team is moving a long-lived ASP.NET platform toward an API-first, React-based architecture, and building AI-assisted development into how we work every day.

Our core values:

• We are customer-centric

• We are vibrantly innovative

• We are relentless learners

• We are in this together

How this role fits:

This is an individual-contributor role at level E25 of our four-level engineering ladder (Associate, Software Engineer, Senior, Staff), built on the Aeries competency matrix. Levels describe scope and independence, not time served. Each level includes the expectations of the levels below it. People management is a separate track.

AI At Aeries:

We expect engineers at every level to use AI coding tools. You are accountable for everything you submit, whoever or whatever wrote the first draft. Student data is protected (for example under FERPA): use only approved tools, and put only approved data into them. Posting notes: bracketed items are open decisions. Standard equal-opportunity, accommodation, and physical-requirements language from HR still needs to be added.

The role:

You are a technical leader across the engineering organization. You set technical direction with the Director of Engineering and the Architecture Council, lead complex cross-organizational projects independently, and change how we work: AI-assisted development, application modernization, and engineering practice. You lead through evidence, example, and influence, and stay hands-on. Districts run on our platform every day, so modernization happens in steps that keep it running. You are building on something customers trust, not starting from scratch.

Must work from one of the following states: AZ, CA, FL, MD, ME, MI, MO, NV, NY, OK, OR, SC, TX, UT, WA, WY.

What you will lead:

• AI-assisted development as a team system. Turn individual tool use into a repeatable practice: shared standards for prompts and project context, review gates for AI-generated code, test and CI expectations, and a way to tell honestly whether it is working (cycle time, defects, rework). Evaluate tools and recommend. Bring offshore partners along.

• Modernization. Set the architecture direction for moving WebForms applications to an APIfirst, React-based platform. Define the migration approach, the shared pattern library, the sequencing, and the risk plan, so work ships in increments inside sprints.

• How the team works. Find where work waits (for approval, for a spec, for a decision) and propose ways to remove the wait: clearer decision boundaries, smaller batches, working agreements. Once approved, lead the adoption.

• Growing people. Mentor across the organization. Grow Senior engineers toward Staff scope. Set the bar in design and code reviews.

• Staying hands-on. Write production code on the hardest problems. This is not an advisoryonly role.

Decision rights

• You propose engineering standards, patterns, and tooling. The Director of Engineering or the Architecture Council approves them.

• Inside approved standards and your own area, you decide and move. You do not wait for signoff on decisions that are easy to reverse. You do bring decisions that are hard to reverse, or that cross into other teams’ areas, to the Director or the Architecture Council.

What We Expect at this Level:

Competency- What it looks like here Execution & Accountability Leads and executes complex cross-organizational projects.

Works independently- Leadership & Collaboration Seeks and incorporates input from across the organization independently. Recommends and implements new programs, processes, technologies, procedures, and guidelines. Acts as a positive role model and mentors others across the organization, helping develop future leaders.

Communication- An example of clear communication across the organization. Influences stakeholders and provides direction.

Critical Thinking- Asks the important questions and anticipates issues in the best interest of the organization. Trusted to use independent judgment, and knows when to give guidance and when to escalate.

Strategic Thinking- Helps set the team vision and aligns it to the organizational vision. Helps define strategy for how to scale the team.

Flexibility & Adaptability- Clarifies ambiguity. Anticipates change and prepares the team for it. Guides the team through change.

Our core values at this level:

Customer centric- Tie technical direction to customer outcomes (platform stability, product quality) and show the connection. Spend time with support and product to hear customers first-hand.

Vibrantly Innovative- Set a direction bigger than the next sprint, then break it into steps teams can take now.

Relentless Learner- Stay ahead on AI and modern engineering practice, and turn what you learn into teaching: workshops, demos, written guides.

In This Together- Be visibly the person who starts. Replace “wait to be asked” with “propose, pilot, show results,” and make it safe for others to do the same. Have direct conversations with peers, partners, and leadership about what is not working, with evidence and kindness.

Disagree, then commit. Own what happens after your proposal: adoption, results, and honest reporting when something does not work.

What you bring:

Required

• 8 or more years of professional software development, with a record of technical leadership across multiple teams or projects as an individual contributor.

• Deep C# and .NET experience, strong web API design, practical React, and sound architecture judgment.

• Has led the modernization of a significant legacy application (ASP.NET WebForms or comparable) into production.

• Has introduced AI-assisted development to a team in a production setting and driven real adoption. You can describe what you tried, what failed, and what the data showed. You can explain when to use an agent versus a single completion, RAG versus tool calls, how to manage context, and where guardrails belong.

• A track record of changing how a team works in ways that lasted.

• Excellent written communication; effective in a remote, distributed team and with offshore partners.

• Solid Scrum grounding: you understand the purpose of the events and artifacts and can coach others.

Preferred

• Deploying agentic workflows to the cloud (AWS ECS, Lambda, Step Functions, or Bedrock; Azure or GCP equivalents are fine).

• Experience with data management across a variety of technologies including relational/nonrelational databases, data lakes etc.

• Playwright in CI/CD; Azure DevOps.

• Domain-driven design, CQRS, event-driven or microservice architecture.

• Building applications on LLM APIs; an inner-source or shared component library.

• Has worked where reliability and data privacy are non-negotiable (education, healthcare, government, finance) and can explain how that shaped engineering decisions. Direct K-12 or SIS experience is a plus: it shortens the learning curve on districts and compliance.

What success looks like:

• First 90 days: learn the codebase, the people, and how work flows today. Deliver one visible improvement. Bring written proposals for AI-assisted development practice and modernization sequencing for approval.

• First 6 months: approved practices in use by the team and measured, with the first migration increments in production.

• First year: the team’s AI practice and migration approach runs without you as the bottleneck, and at least one Senior engineer has visibly grown. These are targets we agree on together, not guarantees.