Software Engineer

About Lilypad Learning

Lilypad Learning is a modern software solution for special education teams in K-12 school districts. Our platform helps schools and districts manage complex workflows across evaluations, IEPs, compliance, documentation, communication, and service coordination.

We believe the teams supporting students deserve software that is powerful, intuitive, and reliable. We are applying AI in practical ways that reduce administrative burden, improve data quality, accelerate workflows, and help educators make better decisions with confidence.

About the Role

We’re looking for a Software Engineer to help build and scale Lilypad’s core platform. This is primarily a full-stack product engineering role for someone who can ship polished user-facing features, design reliable backend systems, and model complex workflows in a thoughtful, scalable way.

You’ll work across the stack on the core product used by educators, service providers, case managers, and district administrators. Much of the role is classic SaaS product engineering: building CRUD features, designing APIs, improving performance and reliability, and delivering intuitive workflows. Experience with applied AI is highly preferred, especially if you’ve helped ship practical AI-powered product features, but strong full-stack engineers without deep AI specialization are encouraged to apply.

What You’ll Do

• Design, build, and maintain customer-facing product features across the frontend, backend, and database layers.
• Develop and improve core workflows for districts, schools, students, cases, documents, and operational processes.
• Build intuitive, high-quality experiences that simplify complex workflows for educators and administrators.
• Design and implement APIs, services, background jobs, and data models that support scalable product development.
• Improve performance, reliability, maintainability, and developer velocity across the platform.
• Partner closely with product, design, engineering, and domain experts to turn user needs into polished solutions.
• Contribute to architecture decisions, mentor other engineers, and help raise the bar for technical execution.

• Where relevant, contribute to AI-powered features such as summarization, document analysis, search, structured extraction, and workflow assistance.

   

What We’re Looking For

Required Qualifications

• 5+ years of software engineering experience building and shipping production applications.
• Strong experience building full-stack web products, including frontend, backend, APIs, and relational data models.
• Experience building and maintaining customer-facing product features in production environments.
• Strong proficiency in TypeScript and JavaScript
• Experience with modern frontend development, ideally with React, TanStack, and TypeScript.
• Experience designing and building backend services with Node.js or similar application frameworks.
• Strong understanding of databases, application architecture, API design, and software design fundamentals.
• Experience writing clean, testable, maintainable code and operating production systems responsibly.
• Hands-on experience shipping applied AI or LLM-powered features, or strong experience building production software with a clear path into applied AI work.
• Strong product intuition and ability to make thoughtful tradeoffs between speed, complexity, scalability, and user experience.

• Excellent communication and collaboration skills in a cross-functional environment.

   

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience building AI-powered product features in production.
• Familiarity with LLM application patterns such as retrieval, structured outputs, semantic search, and evaluation.
• Experience with document intelligence, OCR, extraction systems, or knowledge ingestion pipelines.
• Experience with vector search, hybrid retrieval, reranking, or search relevance optimization.
• Experience with workflow automation, event-driven systems, or background job orchestration.
• Experience building software in compliance-conscious or high-trust environments such as education, healthcare, or fintech.

• Startup experience or comfort operating in ambiguous, rapidly evolving product environments.

   

What Success Looks Like

In this role, success means you:

• ship high-quality product features across the stack that users rely on every day
• improve core workflows through thoughtful software design and strong engineering execution
• build AI capabilities that are practical, measurable, and trusted by users
• contribute to a platform that is scalable, maintainable, and adaptable as the company grows
• help Lilypad become a category-defining product in both workflow software and applied AI for special education

Our Engineering Culture

You’ll work in a modern product engineering environment with a strong emphasis on pragmatic architecture, product quality, and execution. 

Depending on the project, you may work across technologies such as:

• TypeScript / Node.js
• Next.js 16 and React 19
• PostgreSQL / Supabase
• Docker / AWS
• Background jobs and event-driven workflows
• Analytics, observability, and evaluation tooling
• LLM platforms, vector search, and retrieval infrastructure

Why Join Lilypad

• Build software that has real impact on educators, students, and families.
• Work on meaningful product and engineering challenges in a high-trust domain.
• Join a team that values strong engineering fundamentals, product quality, and ownership.
• Have significant ownership over architecture, product direction, and technical standards.
• Help shape practical AI capabilities in a platform that is already in production.