About the role
Job Application for Contract: Senior Software Engineer - Newsela Writing Team at Newsela New Contract: Senior Software Engineer - Newsela Writing Team Remote - Argentina; Brazil; Chile; Colombia; Costa Rica Apply Why You'll Love This Role: We're hiring a Senior Software Engineer Contractor for the Writing product team. This is a hands-on role on a small, full-stack team building AI-powered learning experiences. You'll ship across the product end-to-end: frontend, backend, data, and the LLM-driven services that sit behind our assessment features. We work AI-native. Coding agents (Claude Code, Copilot, Cursor) are how this team builds, reviews, and operates, and we expect senior engineers to do more than use them. The strongest people on the team invest in the harness itself: writing skills, hooks, and custom workflows that make the next person faster. What We're Looking For: A Senior Individual Contributor with a high agency. Someone who: Owns the full lifecycle. Takes a problem from vague ask to shipped, monitored, and stable in production. Comfortable shaping scope without heavy PM guidance. Raises issues early. Catches risks, design drift, and brittle patterns before they reach production - in their own work and in review. Doesn't wait to be asked. Picks up slack outside their lane. Steps into incidents, jumps into a teammate's PR queue, and drives an unowned problem when priorities shift. Builds in the AI-native space with judgment. Uses agents as a daily driver, knows their failure modes, and pushes the team's practice forward - not just their own. Drives delivery. Active in planning and grooming, pushes back on under-specified work, communicates trade-offs clearly to engineering and product partners. Core Responsibilities Ship full-stack features with measurable product impact. Provide substantive code review, architectural feedback, not just approvals. Serve as a first responder for production issues (within working hours): triage, root cause, and preventive measures recommendations. Improve the team's engineering practice over time: tooling, agentic workflows, technical standards, and documentation that lives where work happens. Translate product requirements into a technical approach and communicate the reasoning. Required Experience 5+ years building production web applications, with a strong full-stack range (modern React/TypeScript frontends and a typed or Pythonic backend). Track record of owning ambiguous problems end-to-end and shipping with measurable impact. Substantive code review history - examples of catching architectural issues. Active daily use of AI coding agents (Claude Code, Copilot, Cursor, or similar) with a clear point of view on where they help, where they hurt, and how to keep their output reviewable. Comfort with production debugging across the stack: traces, logs, profiling, the unglamorous parts. Strong async written communication: clear PR descriptions, sharp Slack, sharp specs. Strong Plus Experience extending or building on agentic developer tooling (custom agents, skills, hooks, MCP servers, eval harnesses). Background in rich text editing, document collaboration, or LLM-backed product features. All offers of employment are contingent upon the successful completion of a background check as part of our pre-employment process. Please note that given the nature of the contract, this role will not be eligible to participate in company-sponsored benefits. About Newsela: Newsela is a leading education technology company dedicated to meaningful classroom learning for every student. We deliver integrated, AI-powered solutions designed to unlock student engagement, empower teachers, and drive meaningful learning outcomes. Our suite of products supports knowledge and skill development, writing practice, daily instruction, assessment, and data-informed decision-making across K–12 classrooms. Grounded in learning science research, Newsela’s solutions integrate content, assessment, and analytics to help educators track progress, understand student outcomes, and deliver high-impact instruction that supports every learner. #LI-Remote Create a Job Alert Interested in building your career at Newsela? Get future opportunities sent straight to your email. Create alert Apply for this job * indicates a required field Autofill with MyGreenhouse First Name * Last Name * Preferred First Name Email * Phone Country * Phone * Location (City) * Locate me Resume/CV * Attach Attach Dropbox Google Drive Enter manually Enter manually Accepted file types: pdf, doc, docx, txt, rtf Cover Letter Attach Attach Dropbox Google Drive Enter manually Enter manually Accepted file types: pdf, doc, docx, txt, rtf Preferred First Name Preferred Pronouns * LinkedIn Profile * Website Pronouns How did you hear about this job? * Are you located in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, or Costa Rica? * Select... What is your permanent work location? * What are your compensation requirements? * Please provide USD per month When is the earliest you could start in this role? * How many years of full-stack software engineering experience do you have? * Select... Do you have experience working with stakeholders and developing analyses to answer critical business questions? * Select... Which of the following are you versed in: * React Typescript JavaScript NodeJS Python AI Coding Agents LLM-backed product features None of the above Please rate your proficiency with English * Select... No Proficiency: Basically no knowledge of the language. The person may know a few words, but can’t form sentences or carry on any type of conversation. Elementary Proficiency: Can form basic sentences, including asking and answering simple questions. This is essentially the starting point of the language proficiency levels. This level reflects someone who is traveling to a new country and who has just begun to study a language. Limited Working Proficiency: Can handle basic work commands and social phrases. They can carry on limited casual conversations at the office and discuss their personal life. Someone at this level still needs help with more extensive conversations in the language. They can only operate independently in basic conversations. Professional Working Proficiency: Can make contributions to office meetings, have conversations with clients, and carry out most work functions requested of them. A person at this level can speak at a normal speed in the language and has a fairly extensive vocabulary. Full Professional Proficiency: Can have advanced discussions on a wide range of topics about personal life, current events, and technical topics such as business and finance. Their vocabulary is extensive and they can carry on conversations with ease. Bilingual Proficiency: Someone at this language proficiency level was either raised speaking the language or has been speaking it so long that they are completely fluent. Submit application Powered by Greenhouse