Founding Engineer, Data Engineering & Integrations

About Journify Learning

Journify Learning is the evidence-based AI assistant that maximizes the efficiency and effectiveness of special education teams. It saves educators time by automating progress tracking and data integration across all support providers, while driving student outcomes through evidence-based practices such as High-Leverage Practices and Universal Design for Learning (UDL). Today, Journify supports educators across 15+ U.S. states and is growing rapidly, empowering teachers, school leaders, and districts to personalize learning and strengthen compliance - all in one intuitive, intelligent platform.

Backed by leading edtech investors including Reach Capital and NewSchools Venture Fund, Journify has raised $3.7M to scale its mission. We've been recognized by Digital Promise for Responsible AI, named a winner of the Tools Competition (the world's largest edtech competition), and most recently selected for the ASU GSV Cup 50 as one of the most innovative edtech products in the K-12 track. Journify is leading the movement to bring ethical, evidence-based AI into classrooms and transform how special education teams work and collaborate. If you're energized by building the data backbone that powers AI in schools, this is the place to make a difference.

The Role

We're looking for a Founding Engineer, Data Engineering & Integrations to own and build the data infrastructure that connects Journify to the systems schools already use every day. Special education teams work across a fragmented landscape of tools, and the quality of Journify's insights depends entirely on our ability to bring that data together cleanly, reliably, and securely.

You'll work directly with our Co-Founder & CTO to design and ship integrations across student information systems, IEP systems, assessment platforms, and learning management systems. You'll build the pipelines, sync infrastructure, and tooling that make Journify feel like a natural extension of a district's existing stack - and you'll be the technical face of Journify to school IT teams and third-party vendors as you do it. This is a founding role. You'll start as an individual contributor owning integrations end-to-end, with the opportunity to grow into the leader of our integrations team as Journify scales.

Key Responsibilities

Design and build our integrations infrastructure • Architect and implement integrations across systems of record used in schools, including SISs, IEP systems, assessment platforms, and LMSs. • Build robust ETL and sync pipelines that handle the realities of school data: inconsistent schemas, varying refresh cadences, partial records, and edge cases across districts. • Design integration patterns that scale across many districts and vendors without becoming brittle or requiring one-off work per customer. • Own the full lifecycle of each integration - from initial scoping and data mapping, to implementation, to monitoring and long-term maintenance.

Build reliable, secure sync and data infrastructure • Implement sync infrastructure across a variety of transport and auth patterns, including SFTP, REST/GraphQL APIs, webhooks, and OAuth-based flows. • Design for reliability: retries, idempotency, observability, alerting, and clean recovery from partial failures. • Treat student data with the care it deserves - build with privacy, security, and compliance (FERPA, COPPA, state-level requirements) as first-class concerns. • Establish the internal tooling, documentation, and runbooks that make integrations maintainable as the team grows.

Partner with school IT teams and third-party vendors • Serve as the primary technical point of contact for school and district IT teams during integration rollouts, moving quickly while keeping them confident and informed. • Work directly with third-party vendors - navigating their APIs, their quirks, their support channels, and occasionally their roadmaps - to unblock integrations and deliver for our districts. • Translate technical requirements clearly for non-technical stakeholders, and advocate for Journify's needs with external teams when necessary.

Work collaboratively across the team • Partner closely with product, partner success, and engineering to prioritize which integrations to build, and to shape the experience of setting them up and living with them. • Feed signals from the field - what's breaking, what's slow, what districts keep asking for - back into our roadmap. • Lay the foundation for an integrations team: write the documentation, build the systems, and shape the hiring bar that the next engineers on this team will inherit.

Ideal Candidate

Background & Experience • 4-5 years of engineering experience with meaningful time spent on data infrastructure, ETL pipelines, or sync infrastructure. • Hands-on experience building integrations in production - including a mix of SFTP-based flows, REST/GraphQL APIs, webhooks, and various auth patterns. • Strong fundamentals in designing data pipelines that are reliable, observable, and recoverable under real-world conditions. • Experience building integrations in EdTech is a significant plus. Familiarity with EdTech data standards (OneRoster, Ed-Fi, SIF) is a nice-to-have, not a requirement. • Comfortable working with the privacy and compliance considerations that come with student data (FERPA, COPPA).

Skills & Mindset • Pragmatic systems thinker: you can design for the long term while shipping something useful this week. • Strong communicator who can hold their own with school IT teams and external vendors - you're just as comfortable on a call with a district CTO as you are in the code. • Detail-oriented and rigorous about data correctness, but comfortable making trade-offs when perfect isn't the goal. • Ownership mindset: you're energized by owning a domain end-to-end and by the ambiguity that comes with founding-team work. • Excited about growing into a leader who will hire, mentor, and build the integrations function over time. • Deep belief in Journify's mission and in the potential of AI to support (not replace) educators and teams.