Senior Software Engineer, Advancement Services

Description

The company runs a fundraising platform for non-profit schools and colleges, used by 1,300+ institutions and trusted by millions of donors. At its current pace it expects to handle $100 billion in charitable giving over the next decade.

The company has Y Combinator among its backers. It has appeared on the Inc. 5000 list of the fastest-growing private companies in each of the last five years and has been profitable in nine of the last ten. In 2025 it closed a $140 million growth investment, which included a major liquidity event for employees, the second in under three years.

The team has 130+ people across 30+ US states and works remotely. The company also has a 12,000 sq ft office in Washington, DC that is open to anyone, and it holds team meet-ups, school visits, and retreats in different locations.

The company is still small compared with its opportunities. It is growing the team to support plans that include a $100 million investment in AI product development.

The Advancement Services team builds the data flow between the company and each school's CRM. The role centres on getting a school's donor data connected, which is the most common reason a school's launch stalls. That data powers GC Intelligence, which predicts likely donors and drafts outreach, Smart Ask Amounts, which suggests gift asks, and GC Gift Officer, the fundraiser tool for managing donor relationships.

The team connects the company to CRMs such as Blackbaud Raiser's Edge NXT and Salesforce-based systems like Ascend and Affinaquest. It owns the partner API, the guided file importer, and a new AWS queue-driven pipeline built to move tens of millions of records.

The team is hiring two Senior Software Engineers to build that pipeline and the two-way integrations that run on it. The role also covers how the team uses AI agents, including the checks, context files, and guardrails that keep agents away from donor data they should not touch.

The team is small and the scope is large, so engineers take ownership of major areas early. Engineers work one-week sprints and the team ships to production several times a day. You will work with the Advancement Services Product Manager, Partner Success, Partner Operations, Data Science, and external CRM vendors and connector partners.

Responsibilities

• Design and ship AWS pipelines with idempotent consumers that keep memory and database load bounded, throttle writes, budget connections, and keep pipeline storage off the app database.
• Build incremental syncs that pick up only changed records, using row hashing that stays correct when batches run in parallel.
• Reconcile records from file uploads, the API, Raiser's Edge NXT, and the company app, including deletes. Handle rate limits so no job exhausts a CRM's request budget.
• Move schools to new infrastructure by proving parity with the old system first, then cutting over while the old path stays available. Ship everything as infrastructure as code, including deploy, recovery, replay, and monitoring.
• Make sure every sync reports to Sentry and New Relic so failures surface before the school's staff notice.
• Design versioned, documented partner endpoints that run through a beta period before general availability.
• Write and maintain the agent context files, build reviewed skills for repeated work such as stacked PRs and support-ticket triage, measure whether tooling changes help, and share what works with the team.

Requirements

• Required: 6+ years building and running production backend systems, including a distributed ETL or sync pipeline that moved tens of millions of records.
• Required: You can explain how your consumers handled redelivery, backpressure, and replay.
• Required: Experience building against third-party APIs, handling auth, token expiry during long pagination, rate limits, retries, and upserts, and knowing what breaks when another system changes without warning.
• Required: Careful data modelling, including external IDs, timezone-safe bulk writes, and safe schema changes on busy core tables.
• Required: Clear written communication. You can write design docs and PR descriptions a distributed team can act on without a meeting, and explain a sync failure to a school's IT staff.
• Strongly preferred: You have made coding agents more reliable through context files, skills, checks, or evals, and you can describe a time you distrusted an agent's output and the check you added afterward.
• Strongly preferred: You ship on AWS or an equivalent cloud using infrastructure as code, and you have owned the deploy, monitoring, and on-call work for what you built.
• Bonus: Integration experience with Blackbaud Raiser's Edge NXT or its SKY API, Salesforce including Ascend or Affinaquest, or school systems such as Ellucian, Veracross, or Slate.
• Bonus: Experience with Ruby on Rails and RSpec.
• Bonus: You have built a public or partner-facing API product with OpenAPI documentation.
• Bonus: You have worked in higher education advancement, nonprofit fundraising, or a related field.

Conditions

Remote-first role based in the U.S. Team members are expected to attend multiple company-wide and team-specific onsites each year.

The role is offered at two levels. IC4 owns major pipeline and integration components with design input from the team. IC5 owns a system's architecture end to end, guides the team's agent practices, and mentors others.

You do not need advancement data knowledge on day one. In your first 90 days you will learn Raiser's Edge NXT, the Blackbaud SKY API, and the supported Salesforce products, along with core school fundraising data: constituents, hard and soft credits, recurring gifts and designations, opportunities and assignments, and events.

Tools include Metabase, New Relic, and the Rails console. Stack: Ruby on Rails, React, Postgres, Redis, AWS (SQS, Aurora, S3, EKS), OpenAPI REST APIs, the Blackbaud SKY API, Salesforce, Sentry, and AI coding agents.

Equal opportunity employer. Applicants are considered without regard to race, colour, creed, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, age, religion, national origin, citizenship status, disability, ancestry, marital status, veteran status, medical condition, or any other protected category under applicable law.