What are the responsibilities and job description for the Sr Software Engineer - Full Stack position at Cygnus Education?
At Cygnus Education, we build technology that empowers higher education institutions to connect more effectively with students and streamline the enrollment journey. Our flagship product, VEGA, is a modern, data-driven solution that powers lead management, compliance workflows, and marketing operations for higher education nationwide.
We’re looking for a Senior Full Stack Software Engineer to take a lead role in shaping VEGA’s architecture and codebase as we scale. This is an opportunity to have end-to-end ownership of systems that directly impact student outcomes and institutional efficiency.
Role Overview
As a Senior Full Stack Engineer on the VEGA team, you’ll help lead the evolution of our platform architecture, with a Ruby on Rails backend, React/TypeScript front-end, hosted on AWS. You’ll collaborate with cross-functional teams across product, design, DevOps, and data to deliver secure, scalable, and high-performing solutions.
This is a hands-on technical leadership role where your ability to mentor peers, influence architecture, and implement best practices will shape both our product and team culture.
Key Responsibilities
- Lead the development and maintenance of the VEGA web application using Ruby on Rails, React, and TypeScript.
- Drive the architecture and technical design of the VEGA system with an emphasis on scalability, maintainability, availability, and performance.
- Design and maintain our high-availability cloud infrastructure hosted on AWS and managed with Terraform.
- Collaborate with product managers, designers, and fellow engineers to define and deliver new features and core improvements aligned with higher education workflows.
- Optimize performance and scalability across the platform, including backend services and frontend UI.
- Develop and maintain CI/CD pipelines and infrastructure-as-code, ensuring system reliability and rapid iteration.
- Monitor and maintain platform health using Datadog and other observability tools.
- Lead by example with clean code, thoughtful pull requests, and proactive mentorship of senior and mid-level engineers.
- Champion a culture of technical excellence, knowledge sharing, and continuous improvement.
Required Qualifications
- 5 - 10 years of experience designing, building, and deploying large-scale full stack applications and distributed systems.
- Proven experience in system design and architecture of SaaS products or enterprise-grade web platforms.
- Strong backend skills in Ruby on Rails, with production experience building and maintaining high-availability APIs and services.
- Frontend proficiency with React and TypeScript, with strong UI development sensibilities.
- Familiarity with testing frameworks such as RSpec, Capybara, and Chromatic/Storybook.
- Practical experience with AWS, including services like IAM, ECS, RDS, and S3.
- Deep understanding of SQL, query optimization, and relational data modeling.
- Experience managing infrastructure-as-code using Terraform.
- Experience with CI/CD tooling such as CircleCI and AWS CodeBuild/CodePipeline.
- Familiarity with monitoring, tracing, and alerting via Datadog or similar tools.
- Strong debugging skills.
- Ability to lead initiatives and mentor peers while collaborating cross-functionally.
- Excellent communication skills—able to articulate technical concepts clearly to both technical and non-technical stakeholders.
- A self-driven mindset: curious, resourceful, and passionate about education technology and impact-driven development.
Nice to Have
- Experience in edtech, lead management, or compliance-heavy applications.
- Experience building integrations with CRMs like Salesforce, IdPs like Google and Entra, and advertising platforms such as Meta, Google, TikTok, and Snap.
- Contributions to open source or technical community engagement.