Job Description
Finalsite is the preferred website, communications, enrollment, and marketing platform of more than 7,000 schools and school districts in 119 countries around the world. The company’s people, products and services transform how schools connect and engage with their community, recruit students and staff, and fundraise; while managing the complex requirements around data privacy, accessibility, hosting and security. Finalsite products and services include award-winning website designs, a robust content management system, mass communications tools, a powerful enrollment management system, innovative inbound marketing tools, data integration, training, support and marketing consulting. Finalsite is headquartered in Glastonbury, CT, USA with employees who work remotely in nearly every state in the U.S. as well as Europe, South America, and Asia. For more information, please visit www.finalsite.com.
Vision
To build innovative solutions that elevate school engagement.
Location
Remote, India. Full time employment for this role.
Finalsite is a global company and to enable strong collaboration, we have established common core working hours. Candidates should be comfortable working from 11:30-21:00 IST, with core working hours being 18:00-21:00 IST
Summary of Responsibility
When a school goes into lockdown, closes for a storm, or needs to reach every family before the buses leave, the message goes through Finalsite. Our communications platform carries emergency alerts, district notifications, and everyday parent communication for thousands of schools and districts. The traffic is not smooth. The platform can sit at a routine baseline and then, with no warning, need to deliver a single message to hundreds of thousands of recipients within minutes. You will own significant parts of that platform, including how your areas behave in production.
The system is established and carries a lot of history. There is a messaging core with years of accumulated behavior, services spread across more than one cloud, queue-driven pipelines, and delivery paths that end at carriers and inbox providers we do not control. Parts of it are well documented, and parts are understood by fewer people than they should be. A modernization effort is underway, and it has to proceed while the platform keeps running at full volume.
This is a role for an engineer who wants to own their work all the way into production. At Finalsite, engineering owns the how and the when: technical design, estimates, the quality and operability of what ships, and the call on whether a release is ready. Tests are part of the work rather than a phase that follows it, and monitoring and alerting are part of the design. When something you own misbehaves in production, you are expected to help understand it, restore service, and make the system more resilient afterward.
The position is based in India, joining six engineers already on this team here and working with colleagues in the United States and Poland. The team spans time zones, so writing things down, keeping decisions visible, and getting yourself unblocked matter more here than they would on a team sitting in one room.
We are not screening for our exact stack. Experience with messaging or notification infrastructure will make you useful faster and we would be glad to have it, but a strong engineer who has built and operated high-volume backend systems can learn this domain. What matters more is whether you can work confidently inside a system you did not write, whose behavior is not fully documented, and change it without breaking the schools that depend on it.
Key Responsibilities
Own one or more significant services in the messaging path end to end, covering design, implementation, automated tests, monitoring, and behavior in production
Take areas that are fragile or thinly understood and leave them better by adding coverage, expanding observability, retiring debt, and writing down what previously lived only in someone's head
Make delivery observable, so the team can quickly answer what was sent, what arrived, what did not, and why
Contribute to modernization in ways that survive contact with the existing system, favoring incremental migration, coexistence periods, and rollback paths over a parallel rewrite
Bring SRE in at design time rather than deploy time, and build on the tooling they provide
Be dependable during incidents in your areas. Jump in without waiting to be asked, and turn each incident into a test, an alert, or a fix that makes the next one smaller
Estimate your work and communicate technical and schedule risk early, flagging when an estimate depends on a part of the system nobody has documented
Review designs and code for others, and mentor less experienced engineers, including guiding them through the RFC process
Take responsibility for the quality and productivity of the team beyond your own assigned work
Qualifications and Skills
Required:
Seven or more years building production backend software, including services that carried meaningful volume
Experience operating what you build. You have instrumented your own services, been called about them, and fixed them yourself
Comfort in an established codebase you did not write, where behavior is not fully documented, and the ability to work out what a system does before changing it
Practical experience with asynchronous, queue-driven, or event-driven systems and their failure modes, including retries, duplicates, backpressure, partial failure, and out-of-order delivery
Automated testing as a normal part of how you work
Strong written communication in English, and a track record of making progress across time zones rather than waiting for the next overlap window
Based in India, with regular working overlap with colleagues in Europe and the United States
Preferred:
Messaging, notification, or delivery infrastructure at scale, covering email, SMS, voice, or push, including deliverability, throttling, and provider limits
Managed cloud messaging and serverless building blocks, such as hosted queues and pub/sub, event-driven compute, and NoSQL data stores, on any major cloud provider
Kubernetes, infrastructure-as-code, and comfort operating in a multi-cloud environment
Experience with C or C++ alongside a higher-level language such as Python
Instrumenting a system that had little observability, and building alerts a team comes to trust
Incremental modernization of a running system, including strangler patterns, coexistence, and migration without a freeze
Raising the technical bar on a team through mentoring, review, and improving shared practice
Fluency with AI-assisted development tools, and judgment about where they help
Experience building software where failure has consequences for the people using it
RESIDENCY REQUIREMENT
Finalsite offers 100% fully remote employment opportunities, however, these opportunities are limited to permanent residents of India. Current residency, as well as continued residency, within India is required to obtain (and retain) employment with Finalsite.
DISCLOSURES
Finalsite is proud to be an equal opportunity workplace and is an affirmative action employer. We are committed to equal employment opportunities regardless of race, color, ancestry, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, age, citizenship, marital status, disability, gender identity or Veteran status. We also consider qualified applicants regardless of criminal histories, consistent with legal requirements. EEO is the Law. If you have a disability or special need that requires accommodation, please contact Finalsite's People Operations Team. Finalsite is committed to the full inclusion of all qualified individuals. As part of this commitment, Finalsite will ensure that persons with disabilities or special needs are provided a reasonable accommodation. Ensure your Finalsite job offer is legitimate and don't fall victim to fraud. Ask your recruiter for a phone call or other type of verbal communication and ensure all email correspondence is from a finalsite.com email address. For added security, where possible, apply through our company website at finalsite.com/jobs.
