Senior Software Engineer, Optimizer

About the role

WHO WE ARE

School scheduling is a hard problem, one that technology was meant to solve. Yet for decades, the master schedule has been built by hand, consuming educators’ valuable time while delivering a sub-optimal result for students. We started Timely to build the tool we wish we had when we were in schools. And today, we are changing how schools create high quality schedules for teachers and students. Timely combines groundbreaking AI technology with support from a team of expert school schedulers: saving schedulers’ time, and surfacing opportunities for leaders to unlock staff potential. Timely delivers optimized master schedules that are more efficient, accommodate diverse educator needs, and enable student access to courses and pathways that impact their lives.

Our district and school partners agree: scheduling is a key opportunity for educational innovation, and that Timely is the indispensable partner in addressing the challenge. We’re experiencing exciting growth as a company, while doubling down on our mission and people-centered approach to leveraging powerful technology. We serve districts and charter school organizations across 20+ states, growing (and renewing) at rates that lead the education technology industry. This growth has been driven by our strong product-market fit, deep understanding of education, and commitment to customer success.

ABOUT THE ROLE

We are seeking a Senior Software Engineer who will design, build, and maintain our core optimization technology along with the full-stack and data-intensive systems surrounding it, powering scheduling for our users. You will be expected to lead challenging technical projects encompassing these technical domains. You will also be responsible for operationalizing the optimizer product for scale and usage: being on-call as needed, establishing tests and observability, and running data-driven experiments to inform decisions about the core technology. Finally, you’ll provide leadership within your squad and with the overall engineering team on critical engineering concerns that accelerate our ability to deliver value to customers at high quality and high scale.

KEY RESPONSIBILITIES

- Partner with product to surface and refine improvements in the optimizer’s core algorithm, model-builders, and the full-stack job orchestration framework built around it.

- Research, recommend, and implement extensions to the core optimization technology: leveraging new technologies (including generative AI and machine learning) to improve accuracy, speed, and accessibility for users.

- Lead major projects or initiatives as necessary while also supporting the product squad as a whole in meeting their goals. Drive the process of defining and disambiguating new opportunities when necessary.

- Provide technical leadership over at least some key areas of the stack for the optimizer squad, along with the wider engineering team.

- Exhibit and apply best practices around communication, collaboration, and project management to facilitate effective, timely, and high quality delivery of work.