The Senior Software Engineer is a hands-on, full-stack engineer who owns the delivery of product features from acceptance criteria to production. Working primarily on Traverse and Grove, this role takes a feature or epic, designs it, builds it, tests it, ships it, and stays accountable for how it behaves in production, without needing task-level direction.
This role is the team's dependable owner of scoped, multi-card work and a day-to-day technical resource for less experienced engineers. The Senior Software Engineer makes and documents local architectural tradeoffs within established patterns, uses AI-assisted development as a fluent daily practice, and helps engineers on the team grow through pairing and code review. Team-wide technical direction and code quality standards are owned by the Principal Engineer role, and the Senior Software Engineer co-builds the agentic engineering framework alongside the Principal Engineer. This is a hybrid role working 3 days out of our Dublin, OH office.
Experience
Required:
- 5+ years of professional software development experience in a SaaS or web product environment, including production ownership of features you designed and delivered.
- Professional experience with Ruby on Rails and a modern JavaScript/TypeScript front end (React preferred), and with relational database design and query performance in PostgreSQL.
- Working knowledge of AWS at the application layer (for example S3, queues, and managed database or serverless services), sufficient to deploy, debug, and operate your own features.
- Experience reviewing others' code and mentoring less experienced engineers.
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
Nice to Have:
- Experience in Health and Human Services, government technology, or another regulated vertical SaaS domain.
- Experience with multi-tenant SaaS architecture or Domain-Driven Design.
- Experience contributing to agentic SDLC practices such as AI-assisted code review, automated test generation, or prompt and runbook standards.
- Experience with serverless architectures or mobile application development.
- Familiarity with SOC 2 or HIPAA-aligned engineering practices.
What you’ll be doing
Feature Ownership, Design, and Quality
- Own features and epics end to end, from refinement and design through implementation, automated testing, release, and production follow-up, with minimal direction and a clear record of delivering on commitments.
- Design the feature before building it: data model and PostgreSQL schema changes, Rails models and services, API contracts, and React/TypeScript component structure. Make local architectural tradeoffs and document the reasoning in the merge request or design notes.
- Participate actively in Amigos and refinement: challenge unclear acceptance criteria, surface risks and dependencies early, and split oversized work into small, end-to-end slices.
- Write and own automated tests across unit, integration, and end-to-end levels for the work you ship, and treat passing tests and a clean pipeline as part of the definition of done.
- Follow the team's established architecture patterns, code quality standards, and security-by-default practices, and raise proposed changes to them for team decision rather than diverging on your own.
- Handle sensitive case, family, and agency data with care, applying least-privilege access, input validation, and data protection practices expected of software used by HHS agencies.
Production Operations and AI-Assisted Delivery
- Deploy your own changes through the GitLab pipeline, verify them in production, and follow through on regressions using logs, error tracking, and metrics.
- Participate in the on-call rotation: triage and resolve production issues, communicate status clearly, escalate early when needed, and contribute to blameless post-mortems and their follow-up actions.
- Use AI-assisted development tools (Claude Code as the primary tool, with GitHub Copilot or Codex as secondary) as a daily working practice: frame prompts with context and constraints, decompose work into verifiable steps, review and correct AI output, and never ship code you cannot explain.
- Co-build the team's agentic engineering framework with the Principal Engineer: contribute improvements to runbooks, prompts, and workflows, and bring what you learn in daily AI-assisted work back into how the team builds software.
Mentoring and Team Collaboration
- Mentor Software Engineers through pairing, thorough code review, and direct, actionable feedback, and serve as an escalation point for engineers working through technical problems.
- Keep growing too: pair with the Principal Engineer on hard problems, welcome direct feedback on your own code and designs, and take on work that stretches you.
- Review merge requests for correctness, test coverage, security, and maintainability, explaining the reasoning behind your feedback.
- Collaborate with Product Managers, QA, DevOps, and Solution Architects to clarify requirements, plan releases, and resolve customer-impacting issues.
- Communicate progress, risks, and decisions clearly in writing so teammates can follow your thinking without being in the room.
- Perform other job-related duties as assigned to support departmental goals and continuous improvement initiatives.
You may be a good fit for our team if you have the following skills…
- Strong full-stack proficiency with Ruby on Rails, React/TypeScript, and PostgreSQL, with the ability to work confidently across the backend, front end, and database layers of a feature.
- Demonstrated ability to own a feature or epic end to end and deliver it reliably without close direction.
- Sound design judgment: able to model data, design APIs, weigh tradeoffs, and explain and document decisions to engineers and non-technical stakeholders.
- Automated testing ownership across unit, integration, and end-to-end levels, built alongside the feature rather than after it.
- Working experience shipping and operating software in production: CI/CD pipelines, deployments, observability, debugging live issues, and participating in on-call or incident response.
- Genuine, practiced AI-assisted development as a daily habit: you use agentic tooling (Claude Code, GitHub Copilot, Codex, or equivalent) to write, test, and debug code, your productivity shows it, and you have the judgment to verify, correct, and reject AI output.
- Ability to mentor through pairing and code review, giving feedback that is specific, respectful, and useful.
- Clear written and verbal communication, and comfort working in a flat, high-trust team where peer accountability is the norm and everyone's work is visible.
- Must be authorized to work in the U.S.
What we provide
- Medical (includes H.S.A. option with employer contribution), dental, and vision insurance
- Short- and long-term disability
- Company paid basic life insurance
- 401(k) with 4% company match and immediate vesting
- Free financial education and consultation
- Wellness program that helps you earn lower premiums
- Robust EAP program that includes free therapy sessions, lifestyle coaching, legal/ID theft services, and more
- 12 weeks fully paid parental leave
- Up to $5,000 adoption fee reimbursement
- $500 wellness reimbursement after 60 days of employment
- Generous PTO policy and 10 company paid holidays
- Company paid cell phone plan
Find yourself checking a lot of these boxes but doubting whether you should apply? Studies have shown that women and people of color are less likely to apply to jobs unless they meet every qualification. At Northwoods, we are dedicated to building a diverse, inclusive, and authentic workplace, so if you are excited about this role but your experience doesn’t align perfectly with every qualification in the job description, we encourage you to apply anyway. You may be just the right candidate for this or other roles. Northwoods is committed to diversity in its workforce and is proud to be an equal opportunity employer. We are excited to work with talented people, period. All employment decisions are based on business needs, job requirements, and individual qualifications, without regard to race, color, religion or belief, national or ethnic origin, gender, age, disability, sexual orientation, gender identity and/or expression, marital or civil status, political affiliation, family or parental status, or any other status protected by the laws or regulations in the jurisdictions in which we operate.
Who is Northwoods?
Northwoods makes software solutions that improve the quality of the life of case managers and social workers in the Health and Human Services (HHS) field. Recognized as one of Columbus’ top places to work, working at Northwoods means being part of a team that’s passionate about making an impact on the lives of HHS professionals and the families they serve.
We believe in creating a culture of inclusivity and accountability seeking to hire professional, passionate and driven individuals that believe in the values that we believe in:
- Curiosity – Willing to test assumptions, courage to ask questions, and active listening.
- Community – Helping and mentoring each other, celebrating diversity and acknowledging our team members’ contributions.
- Resourcefulness – Willing to try and fail. Asking for help and trusting the expertise of our team.
- Stewardship – Safeguarding Northwoods’ values, culture, mission, and resources.
We believe that our team members are all accountable adults, not only to themselves but to each other, and we treat them that way. Our team works incredibly hard and is proven through dedication to their craft and our mission.
Our Solutions
Our products are designed for state and county social care program areas, including child welfare, childcare, child support, economic assistance and adult & aging agencies. These solutions leverage technology to allow case workers and social workers to easily collect, store, manage, and share case content and data more efficiently. By simplifying processes, our customers can spend more time engaging with the families they serve, make better informed decisions and achieve better outcomes.
Traverse – A SaaS solution that allows for easy, on-the-go access to case files, case work and interview forms and intelligent insights on case content and materials, which lead to better engagement and better outcomes.
Compass – Compass solution is some of our longer standing software that supports multiple markets for both state and county customers. Our focus on reducing time wasted on paperwork and administrative burdens allows case workers to better serve families in need.
Grove - Our trusted team of experienced child welfare professionals becomes an extension of agency staff supporting them with administrative tasks such as referral and records requests, compiling documents for court, and document organization. Workers can focus on fostering healthier families without sacrificing their own well-being.