Backend Software Engineer

About Us:

Trusted and loved by 25 million educators, students, and families worldwide, Seesaw is the only elementary learning experience platform, offering a suite of award-winning tools, resources, and curriculum for teachers to deliver joyful, inclusive instruction.  Through interactive lessons, digital portfolios, and two-way communication features, Seesaw keeps everyone in the learning loop by providing continuous visibility into the student's learning experience to support and celebrate their learning.

Our Mission:

Seesaw’s mission is to provide every elementary student with joyful and connected learning experiences that lay the foundation for success in life. We have been growing quickly in MENA over the last few years, and we are excited to invest in our growth in the region. To better support our MENA and Arabic-speaking customers, we are beginning to staff roles in Amman and build our on-the-ground presence.

Your Team: 

Seesaw is expanding our engineering organization in Jordan and hiring a Backend Engineer to join our new International Growth team. This team plays a key role in preparing Seesaw for international expansion, especially across the MENA region. You will work on high-impact backend systems that improve Arabic support across AI features, enhance text/assessment pipelines, and support future SIS/LMS integrations for government partnerships.

Solving impactful problems on Seesaw’s Engineering team feels different from any other place. First, we are given ownership over the product roadmap early on, collaborating on how and when things will be built from the start. Second, we have a strong connection to the user, listening to teacher feedback and observing how students and families interact with the platform in real life to iterate over our releases. And third, we enjoy ample autonomy to experiment and grow, and often see our ideas pushed to production in weeks, not months.

Globally, millions of children rely on Seesaw every day. That fact is inspiring, and at times, daunting. While we derive a deep sense of purpose from being able to improve students’ learning, it also means we’re emotionally invested in both the successes and failures. So when a child can’t log into their account or something on the platform breaks, we feel it. 

Like the rest of the company, our team is growing fast. Keeping up with the pace of growth can be challenging, and we need your flexibility as we define and refine what we need to be. We often learn by shipping, so you won’t find an obsession with rigid processes here. As the Engineering team ramps up hiring, we’re committed to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI); constantly surveying employees, participating in training, and learning from our DEI Committee.

Though we care deeply and work diligently, there’s no extra credit for working long nights or spending weekends squashing bugs. When we’re off, we’re really off, enjoying our personal lives and recharging our batteries.

At the end of the day, we delight in how much our users adore our product. It’s incredibly fulfilling to read thank you tweets from teachers and know that, hey, we built something that makes a meaningful impact! And while we saw massive growth during the pandemic, we’ve still got a lot more growing to do. Joining our team now means you’ll get to help us take on new markets and innovate the next features that make the learning experience even better. 

Your Role:

This is a role for an engineer who enjoys solving deep technical problems, working with complex data pipelines, and integrating with AI/ML models — with a focus on delivering high-quality experiences for schools, teachers, and students.

Your Responsibilities:

• Design and build backend services and pipelines that power Arabic-enabled features such as AI activity generation, resource conversion, Reading Fluency (Arabic), and Read With Me (Arabic).
• Collaborate closely with product, design and cross-functional engineering teams to integrate and operationalize AI/ML models and ensure high-quality Arabic input/output and proper RTL handling.
• Develop robust APIs, data models, and asynchronous job workflows that support Seesaw’s international expansion and bilingual classroom needs.
• Support critical rostering or integration issues, partnering with Support to maintain reliability for schools without taking on routine tickets.
• Contribute to architecture, technical roadmap planning, and engineering best practices to help establish a strong backend culture in the new Jordan team.
  

Your Requirements:

• 3+ years of backend engineering experience, ideally with Python, AWS
• Strong understanding of Computer Science fundamentals, whether gained through a CS degree or equivalent experience (bootcamps + non-traditional backgrounds welcome).
• Direct experience designing, developing, and maintaining backend services at scale — the best candidates can speak to data models, queueing systems, API boundaries, and production constraints.
• Familiarity with modern web technologies and service architectures, including REST APIs, RPC frameworks, and asynchronous job pipelines.
• Comfort working within complex distributed systems, especially when dealing with text-processing pipelines, encoding issues, or language-specific logic (e.g., RTL, bidi text).
• Ability to write clean, maintainable, self-documenting code and to design simple, elegant solutions for complex backend problems.
• Experience integrating with or consuming ML/AI models, whether through APIs, SDKs, or custom services (OCR, ASR, NLP, TTS are a plus).

Preferred Experience:

• Strong backend intuition and a desire to build performant, robust, and thoughtful features inside a complex international platform.
• Experience with Python, Flask, DynamoDB, Postgres, Redis, message queues, or backend storage/caching layers.
• Experience working with AI/ML pipelines, especially around text processing, OCR, speech recognition, or TTS — particularly useful for Arabic feature work.
• Familiarity with localization and internationalization, including adapting products for RTL, Arabic text shaping, and regional educational workflows.
• Experience with SAML/OIDC, SIS/LMS integrations, or data interoperability standards (OneRoster, CSV/XLSX/XML export formats).
• Comfort debugging tricky language formatting issues, including encoding, RTL rendering, and Unicode/bi-directional text handling.
• A strong product sense and empathy for users, especially teachers and students in bilingual or Arabic-medium classrooms.
• Experience with cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, or similar) — especially S3, Lambda, queueing systems, or event-driven architectures.