Senior Product Engineer

Inspira Education Group is one of the fastest-growing edtech startups in the US. We started with a simple mission to democratize access to high-quality coaching so that every student in the world has an equal opportunity to access the best opportunities.

As the world’s leading network of top admissions coaches in medical, legal, business, and college studies, we’re building software and services in one place—disrupting long-entrenched application processes with products and experiences that strive to provide an equal platform for candidates from diverse backgrounds worldwide.

As one of the fastest-growing edtech firms in the world, we are backed by some of the leading venture capital firms and investors in the world, including Zeev Ventures, Quiet Capital, Craft Ventures and Jeff Fluhr (Founder of Stubhub).

About the role

We’re looking for a strong full-stack engineer who can own the complete product development process: understand a business problem, define the solution, design the user experience, build the software, and improve it after launch.

You’ll work closely with leadership and business teams, combining hands-on engineering with product management and design responsibilities. You should be highly effective with AI coding tools and have the technical depth to independently review, debug, secure, and maintain everything you ship.

This is an in-person role requiring 5 day/week in our NYC office.

What you’ll own

• Translate business needs and user feedback into product requirements, user flows, prototypes, and prioritized development plans.
• Design and build polished applications across the front end, back end, database, and integrations.
• Make architecture decisions and scope releases that balance speed, reliability, and future maintainability.
• Use AI tools throughout development to accelerate implementation, testing, debugging, and documentation.
• Own deployment, production monitoring, incident resolution, and ongoing improvements.
• Measure whether your work improves adoption, conversion, operational efficiency, or another relevant business outcome.

Required technical skills

• Front-end engineering
• Strong HTML and CSS skills, with the ability to implement responsive layouts and consistent visual design.
• Experience managing forms, validation, application state, asynchronous data, caching, and loading/error states.
• Ability to diagnose rendering issues and improve page performance, bundle size, and unnecessary network requests.
• Ability to build accessible interfaces with semantic markup, keyboard navigation, and appropriate focus management.
• Back-end development and API design
• Strong proficiency in Node.js and TypeScript, using a framework such as Express, NestJS, or an equivalent.
• Experience designing and implementing REST APIs, including validation, pagination, consistent error handling, and API documentation.
• Experience implementing authentication, authorization, role-based access, and third-party integrations.
• Ability to build reliable background jobs and webhook processing, including retries, duplicate-event handling, and failure recovery.
• Understanding of timeouts, rate limits, caching, and common application bottlenecks.
• Databases and data modeling
• Strong practical knowledge of PostgreSQL and SQL.
• Ability to design relational schemas, relationships, constraints, and indexes.
• Experience with database migrations, transactions, and investigating slow queries.
• Familiarity with an ORM such as Prisma or Drizzle, along with the ability to inspect and optimize the underlying SQL.
• Ability to handle data integrity, concurrent updates, and safe changes to production data.
• Deployment and production operations
• Experience independently deploying and operating applications on a cloud platform such as AWS, GCP, Azure, or Vercel.
• Working knowledge of Git, pull requests, CI/CD pipelines, environment configuration, and secrets management.
• Familiarity with Docker and reproducible development environments.
• Ability to set up useful logs, error tracking, monitoring, and alerts.
• Experience handling releases, database migrations, rollbacks, and production debugging.
• Testing, security, and code quality
• Ability to write meaningful unit, integration, and end-to-end tests using tools such as Vitest/Jest and Playwright/Cypress.
• Practical understanding of secure sessions, server-side permission checks, input validation, SQL injection, XSS, and protection of sensitive data.
• Ability to structure maintainable code, review changes critically, and refactor without breaking existing behavior.
• Regular, hands‑on use of tools such as Cursor, Claude Code