Senior Software Engineer, Emerging Product

Description

At GiveCampus, we build high-impact teams that operate like a startup within the startup—nimble, empowered, and laser-focused on solving specific challenges with real urgency and measurable outcomes. This role is part of one such dedicated Business Unit (BU): a lean, entrepreneurial team pushing a brand-new product from zero to one.

About the role

We’re hiring a Senior Software Engineer to help shape GC Gift Officer, a product that helps professional fundraisers, student programs, and AI agents at schools manage donor relationships and raise more money for education. Used by a rapidly growing number of schools, it combines substantial technical depth with a product direction that’s still evolving. Our small, autonomous business unit operates with the urgency and adaptability of an early-stage startup as we work toward product-market fit.

You’ll help determine what we build and take responsibility for making it work. That means working closely with product, design, and customer-facing teammates to understand problems, challenge assumptions, and ship useful improvements quickly. Your work might involve building a full-stack feature, prototyping an idea, untangling a difficult production issue, or joining a customer call to understand where a workflow falls short.

We especially value startup and early-stage experience: you’ve worked with incomplete information, taken ownership beyond a narrowly defined role, and changed direction as you learned. You’re comfortable getting deep into an existing system and resourceful about finding a path forward. You bring the judgment to know when a focused experiment will answer the question and when reliability, performance, or maintainability needs deeper investment.

This is an opportunity to influence both the software and the business it supports. You’ll stay close to customers, see the results of your work, and help a small team turn early adoption into lasting product-market fit.

Responsibilities

• Own problems from discovery through production. Help define the problem, shape the solution, implement and deploy it, and follow through on how it performs for customers.
• Build across the stack. Deliver full-stack features and improvements, contributing wherever the problem takes you — from user interfaces and backend services to integrations, data, and infrastructure.
• Help decide what we build and why. Work with product, design, and business unit teammates to evaluate opportunities, challenge assumptions, and identify the useful next step.
• Experiment, ship, and learn quickly. Use prototypes, incremental releases, customer feedback, and usage data to test ideas. Adjust or retire approaches when the evidence points elsewhere.
• Stay close to customers. Join customer conversations and partner with onboarding and customer success teams to understand real workflows, investigate friction, and uncover opportunities.
• Evolve a complex product. Make architecture decisions, simplify existing systems, and address technical constraints that slow delivery or limit what customers can accomplish.
• Keep the product dependable. Investigate production issues and improve performance, reliability, security, and maintainability, using judgment to balance immediate needs with longer-term investments.
• Make the team stronger. Share context, mentor teammates, contribute thoughtful code reviews, and help improve engineering practices and hiring as the business unit grows.
• What you bring
• 8+ years of experience building software in startup-like environments.
• Full-stack engineering experience: proficiency in JavaScript, Ruby, or Python; experience with Rails or a comparable web framework; and experience with React or another frontend framework, PostgreSQL, RESTful APIs, and cloud infrastructure (AWS, GCP, etc.).
• Passion for building with users, not just for them—you’re comfortable joining user interviews, shadowing onboarding, or jumping into metrics.
• Clear, asynchronous communication skills — especially important in our distributed environment.
• Proven ability to prioritize ruthlessly, ship continuously, and solve problems creatively.
• Appetite for wearing many hats, operating with autonomy, and solving messy first-time problems.
• Comfort and curiosity using AI tools (e.g., GitHub Copilot, ChatGPT, Code Interpreter, Claude, etc.) to boost speed, reduce toil, and elevate quality.
• Bonus points for
• Experience building and maintaining production applications with Ruby on Rails.
• Previous experience in a founding or early engineer role.
• Familiarity with education, fundraising, or donor engagement platforms.
• Exposure to low-code tools, internal platforms, or scrappy MVP development.
• Past contributions to product design, GTM strategy, or customer success efforts.
• Experience automating workflows or building with/around AI-powered systems.
• What you'll love about us
• A mission that matters: helping schools fund futures.
• An engineering org that values craft, autonomy, and impact.
• The opportunity to work at the cutting edge of product incubation inside a mission-driven company.
• Competitive compensation, vacation, wellness benefits, and more.
• A culture that values deep work, clear priorities, and rolling up our sleeves to get things done.
• Ready to build something that matters from the ground up? Apply now—we can’t wait to meet you.
• Experience: 6+ years
• Visa: US citizen/visa only