Senior Software Engineer (Remote Contractor, Brazil)
About the Role
Kuali's software powers the administrative core of higher education. Our Financials product manages the general ledger, procurement, budgeting, and accounts payable for universities — systems institutions use to move and account for real money under real audit scrutiny. Our platform products manage sponsored research, compliance, curriculum, and degree audit for roughly 150 institutions.
As a Senior Software Engineer, you own a significant subsystem or product domain. You set its technical direction, you make the design decisions that determine whether it stays healthy for the next five years, and you are the engineer other engineers come to. You remain deeply hands-on — this is a building role — while carrying accountability for architecture, quality, and production health well beyond your own commits.
You will work in mature, high-stakes systems where the cost of a defect is measured in an institution's financial close or a stalled research grant, and
where deep domain knowledge compounds into real leverage.
Who are we?
Kuali builds software solutions for higher education. We help our customers — colleges & universities — focus on providing a fantastic education to students by decreasing their administrative costs. We work in a competitive space, ripe for innovation, with users ready to be delighted.
Our Culture
As a company, we are guided by our cultural values:
- Iterate to evolve
- Cultivate openness
- Act with accountability
- Assume the best
- Practice humility
- Deliver amazing experiences
As Kuali Engineers, we learn from and teach each other, we practice transparency and empathy, we delight in delivering value to our customers, and we WIN!
We work remotely and have for years. Distributed work is in our bones, with a history of institutions working together across state lines for more than twenty years. Our employees each work in the environment where they’re happiest, from Pennsylvania to Seattle. We work consciously to create a collaborative and healthy remote work culture, and we travel to meet in person a few times each year.
About you
We’re looking for curious, enthusiastic, empathetic Sr Software Engineers to solve problems, execute on ideas, advocate for the customer, and contribute to a team culture built on trust and mutual respect. As a Sr Software Engineer here, you’ll have a significant impact on what we do and how we do it.
We build and support systems using both Java and Node.js/React. We believe that great developers can always learn new tools. Above any specific tech stack, we’re looking for versatile developers — those who know when to think big and when to act small, and who are comfortable in both greenfield and refactoring projects.
We believe the best results are created by teams who represent a broad range of ideas and perspectives. We value team members with diverse backgrounds and experiences.
What You'll Own:
Architectural Ownership
- Own the architecture of a significant product domain: service boundaries, data models, API contracts, performance characteristics, and failure behavior.
- Lead technical discovery for large, ambiguous initiatives and convert them into sequenced, executable plans with credible estimates.
- Make and document consequential design and build-versus-buy trade-offs, and be accountable for the results.
- Drive deliberate remediation of technical debt with a business case leadership can act on.
Hands-On Delivery
- Design, build, and ship the most complex and highest-risk work in your domain.
- Set the quality bar in code review, test strategy, and documentation.
- Lead incremental refactoring and modernization of legacy components while maintaining continuous delivery to customers.
Correctness, Security & Compliance
- Own correctness in a domain where financial accuracy, audit trails, and tenancy isolation are non-negotiable.
- Ensure your domain satisfies FERPA, SOC 2, and applicable state security program requirements.
- Partner with Compliance and Security on assessments, evidence, and remediation.
Production Ownership
- Own your domain in production: SLOs, instrumentation, performance, and cloud cost.
- Lead incident response and command significant incidents; drive systemic remediation afterward, not just the immediate fix.
- Serve as escalation point for the hardest customer-reported issues in your area.
Technical Leadership
- Mentor engineers at all levels and measurably accelerate their growth.
- Partner directly with Product and your Engineering Manager on roadmap feasibility, sequencing, and risk.
- Represent your domain credibly to executives and, when it matters commercially, to customers.
- Contribute to the organization's adoption of AI-assisted development practices as they mature.
Required Qualifications
- 6–9 years of professional software engineering experience, including significant ownership of production SaaS or enterprise systems.
- Deep proficiency in one or more of our core stacks: Java and Spring, JavaScript/TypeScript, React, Node.js.
- Strong experience with relational databases, data modeling, API design, and distributed system fundamentals.
- Experience with cloud infrastructure (AWS preferred), CI/CD, and automated testing at scale.
- Demonstrated ownership of production services, including on-call leadership and incident command.
- Track record of mentoring engineers.
- Excellent written and verbal communication.
Required Skills:
- Experience with enterprise financial systems, ERP, or other domains with strict correctness and audit requirements.
- Experience leading legacy modernization or migration programs.
- Multi-tenant enterprise SaaS at meaningful scale.
- Experience in regulated environments (FERPA, SOC 2 Type 2, TX-RAMP, HIPAA, or similar).
- Experience with event-driven architectures or message queue technologies.
- Familiarity with higher-education administrative systems.
We’d be delighted if you bring experience with:
- Experience supporting multi-tenant enterprise SaaS.
- Experience migrating production workloads onto AWS from another platform.
- Experience producing infrastructure evidence for SOC 2 or comparable compliance programs.
- Cloud cost optimization experience.
Perks
- Remote-first and results-driven
- Space to work on self-driven projects during quarterly “hack weeks”