Job Details

About Kiddom

Kiddom is a groundbreaking educational platform that promotes student equity and growth by uniting high-quality instructional materials with dynamic digital learning. Through unparalleled curriculum management functionality, Kiddom empowers schools and districts to take ownership of their curriculum – resulting in learning experiences tailored to meet the unique needs and goals of local communities. Kiddom's high-quality curriculum is layered with robust teacher and leader data insights to drive the continuous improvement of instructional decisions, school/district programming, and professional learning.

The Systems Engineering team supports tools and core services that provide a great product experience to our end-users and a great developer experience to our engineering teams. A typical day might start out looking for trouble and end with project plans and cross-functional collaborations that run a thorny problem to ground.

This role combines technical leadership with strategic impact, shaping Kiddom's systems to grow each school year. You'll work in languages from Go to TypeScript to Python, on technologies from web APIs to graph databases to edge computing and LLMs. You will have the opportunity to drive technical change across every team. You will help engineers around you do their best work using tools you select and build. Your outtie is exceptionally good at debugging null pointer exceptions.

Note: We are only hiring in the San Francisco Bay Area OR New York City area with the expectation of coming into the office once a week minimum to help us create and shape our culture and optimize the way we work and collaborate together.

What You'll Do

As a Systems Engineering Lead at Kiddom, you'll be at the heart of building a high-reliability, intelligent educational platform that empowers teachers and students in real-time learning environments. Your role will shape how our systems scale, stay resilient, and remain safe, stable, and effective—especially as we integrate advanced AI and ML into mission-critical learning workflows.

You will:

• Serve as a trusted technical authority on designing and deploying high-reliability, distributed systems in user-facing educational environments.
• Define and manage system-level requirements, engineering metrics, validation strategies, and testing processes to ensure reliability and scalability.
• Identify the highest-leverage technical priorities for a fast-moving, resource-conscious team in a startup setting.
• Lead systems architecture and interface definition across backend, ML, data, and frontend components—aligning cross-functional teams around clear performance, security, and cost budgets.
• Drive trade-off studies and architecture decisions with a focus on platform resilience, safety (e.g., fail-safes around AI usage), and long-term maintainability.
• Develop and maintain high-quality documentation and systems models including concepts of operation, architecture diagrams, and interface specifications.
• Establish rigorous standards for software releases and testing—especially in areas involving LLMs and personalization engines.
• Collaborate closely with engineering, product, data science, and compliance stakeholders to ensure the platform meets regulatory and ethical standards (e.g., FERPA, AI safety).
• Provide technical mentorship and lead one or more systems domains as we scale our team and platform.

What You'll Bring

• 5+ years of hands-on experience with complex, distributed systems in high-reliability domains such as education, healthcare, fintech, aerospace, or industrial automation.
• Proven success establishing systems engineering practices in early-stage or startup environments—especially around requirements management, systems modeling, and testing infrastructure.
• Strong technical breadth across backend systems, APIs, data pipelines, and cloud infrastructure—plus the ability to dive deep when needed.
• Proficiency with systems design tools and modeling frameworks (e.g., UML, SysML, or custom documentation stacks like Notion, Markdown + diagrams).
• Experience building platforms that operate reliably in real-world “noisy” environments—such as handling unstable networks, imperfect data, or diverse hardware.
• Knowledge of safety/resiliency patterns such as fault-tolerant design, automated recovery systems, and graceful degradation strategies—especially as they apply to software and AI systems.
• A collaborative mindset with a track record of cross-functional leadership and clear communication with both technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Passion for building systems that have a meaningful impact—especially in education or mission-driven technology sectors.

Why Kiddom?

At Kiddom, you won't just ship code—you'll help build the foundation for more equitable, effective education for all learners. Join a small, high-impact team using cutting-edge technology to solve real problems in schools, classrooms, and homes across the country.

Let me know if you'd like a version tailored to a more junior or mid-level role, or adapted for a different team (e.g., platform engineering, ML infrastructure).

What we offer

Full time permanent employees are eligible for the following benefits from their first day:

• Competitive salary
• Meaningful equity
• Health benefits: medical (various PPO/HMO/HSA plans), dental, vision, disability and life insurance
• 10 paid sick days per year
• Unlimited vacation time policy (subject to internal approval). Average use 4 weeks off per year.
• Paid family leave after birth/adoption of caretakers and minimum of 16 paid weeks for birthing parents. Meant to supplement benefits offered by State.