Contract Senior Software Engineer, Writing Remote, LATAM

About the Role

We're hiring a Contracted Senior Software Engineer for the Writing product team. This is a hands-on individual contributor role on a small, full-stack group building AI-powered learning experiences. The product is Newsela Writing: teachers create assignments, often built from Newsela 's article library, and students draft essays in a rich-text editor that gives them real-time, rubric-aligned AI feedback - what they did well, what to improve, and what to try next, so they can revise before submitting, while teachers review the AI's grades. You'll ship across the product end-to-end, from the assignment-creation and editing flows and a rich editor, to the rubric models that define how writing is scored and the LLM-driven services behind it all, spanning frontend, backend, and data.

We work AI-native. Coding agents (Claude Code) are how this team builds, reviews, and operates, and we expect senior engineers to do more than use them. The strongest people on the team invest in the harness itself: writing skills, hooks, and custom workflows that make the next person faster.

What We're Looking For

A senior IC with a high agency. Someone who:

• Owns the full lifecycle. Takes a problem from vague ask to shipped, monitored, and stable in production. Comfortable shaping scope without heavy PM guidance.
• Raises issues early. Catches risks, design drift, and brittle patterns before they reach production - in their own work and in review. Doesn't wait to be asked.
• Picks up slack outside their lane. Steps into incidents, jumps into a teammate's PR queue, and drives an unowned problem when priorities shift.
• Builds in the AI-native space with judgment. Uses agents as a daily driver, knows their failure modes, and pushes the team's practice forward - not just their own.
• Drives delivery. Active in planning and grooming, pushes back on under-specified work, communicates trade-offs clearly to engineering and product partners.

Core Responsibilities

• Ship full-stack features with measurable product impact.
• Provide substantive code review, architectural feedback, not just approvals.
• Serve as a first responder for production issues (within working hours): triage, root cause, and preventive measures recommendations.
• Improve the team's engineering practice over time: tooling, agentic workflows, technical standards, and documentation that lives where work happens.
• Translate product requirements into a technical approach and communicate the reasoning.

Required Experience

• 5+ years building production web applications, with a strong full-stack range (modern React/TypeScript frontends and a typed or Pythonic backend).
• Track record of owning ambiguous problems end-to-end and shipping with measurable impact.
• Substantive code review history -