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Inspira Education Group is a fast-growing edtech startup backed by leading VCs including Zeev Ventures, Quiet Capital, Craft Ventures, and Jeff Fluhr (Founder of StubHub). The company operates the world's leading network of top admissions coaches in medical, legal, business, and college studies, combining software and services to democratize access to high-quality coaching and disrupt traditional application processes.
You will be a Founding Engineer responsible for owning the complete product development lifecycle: translating business needs into product requirements, designing user experiences, building full-stack applications, and improving them post-launch. You'll work closely with leadership and business teams, combining hands-on engineering with product management and design responsibilities.
Key responsibilities include:
- Translating business needs and user feedback into product requirements, user flows, prototypes, and prioritized development plans
- Designing and building polished applications across front end, back end, database, and integrations
- Making architecture decisions and scoping releases that balance speed, reliability, and maintainability
- Using AI tools throughout development to accelerate implementation, testing, debugging, and documentation
- Owning deployment, production monitoring, incident resolution, and ongoing improvements
- Measuring whether your work improves adoption, conversion, operational efficiency, or other business outcomes
- Conducting product discovery by speaking with users, understanding workflows, and identifying underlying problems
- Creating user flows and prototypes in Figma or code, including edge cases and failure states
- Instrumenting important user actions and combining analytics with feedback to guide improvements
This is a full-time, in-person role requiring 5 days per week in the NYC office.
REQUIREMENTS:
- Typically 5+ years of software engineering experience, or equivalent evidence of substantial independent ownership
- Track record of shipping and maintaining full-stack production applications
- Examples of features or products where you personally influenced requirements, design, and implementation
- Experience taking loosely defined problems through to a working release
- Strong proficiency in TypeScript, JavaScript, React, and Next.js (component architecture, hooks, routing, client/server rendering)
- Strong HTML and CSS skills with ability to implement responsive layouts and consistent visual design
- Experience managing forms, validation, application state, asynchronous data, caching, and loading/error states
- Ability to diagnose rendering issues and improve page performance, bundle size, and network requests
- Ability to build accessible interfaces with semantic markup, keyboard navigation, and focus management
- Strong proficiency in Node.js and TypeScript using frameworks such as Express, NestJS, or equivalent
- Experience designing and implementing REST APIs (validation, pagination, error handling, documentation)
- Experience implementing authentication, authorization, role-based access, and third-party integrations
- Ability to build reliable background jobs and webhook processing with retries, duplicate-event handling, and failure recovery
- Understanding of timeouts, rate limits, caching, and common application bottlenecks
- Strong practical knowledge of PostgreSQL and SQL
- Ability to design relational schemas, relationships, constraints, and indexes
- Experience with database migrations, transactions, and investigating slow queries
- Familiarity with ORMs such as Prisma or Drizzle
- Ability to handle data integrity, concurrent updates, and safe production data changes
- Experience independently deploying and operating applications on cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, Azure, Vercel)
- Working knowledge of Git, pull requests, CI/CD pipelines, environment configuration, and secrets management
- Familiarity with Docker and reproducible development environments
- Ability to set up useful logs, error tracking, monitoring, and alerts
- Experience handling releases, database migrations, rollbacks, and production debugging
- Ability to write meaningful unit, integration, and end-to-end tests using tools such as Vitest/Jest and Playwright/Cypress
- Strong debugging skills across browser behavior, API requests, application logs, and database queries
- Practical understanding of secure sessions, server-side permission checks, input validation, SQL injection, XSS, and sensitive data protection
- Ability to structure maintainable code, review changes critically, and refactor without breaking existing behavior
- Regular, hands-on use of AI coding tools such as Cursor, Claude Code, GitHub Copilot, or Codex
- Ability to give AI tools useful repository context, break complex work into verifiable tasks, and guide implementation across multiple files
- Ability to evaluate generated code for correctness, security, maintainability, and compatibility
- Experience using tests, type checks, linting, and code review to validate AI-generated changes
- Ability to explain and debug resulting code independently and recognize when AI-generated approaches should be revised
NICE TO HAVE:
- Python and FastAPI experience
- Experience building AI features using model APIs, structured outputs, tool calling, or retrieval with attention to evaluation, latency, and cost
- Experience integrating CRMs, payment systems, analytics platforms, or business workflow tools
- Experience as an early startup engineer or independent product builder
