Senior Software Engineer, Scoring

Senior Software Engineer, Scoring

New Meridian Corporation, located in Austin, TX seeks outstanding candidates for the Senior Software Engineer, Scoring. This position, reporting to the Director of Waypoint Administration, Scoring, and Reporting, will assume responsibility for analysis, design, development, unit testing and implementation of a K-12 educational assessment technology solutions at New Meridian Corporation.

WHO WE ARE

New Meridian is a non-profit, assessment design and development organization. We believe assessments should focus on skills that matter: critical thinking, deep understanding, and the ability to communicate ideas effectively, helping prepare students to adapt and thrive in a complex world.

At New Meridian, we create high-quality assessments that measure these skills to ensure all students have access to valuable educational experiences.

Our mission is to advance the quality of public education for all students by designing assessments that focus on the skills that matter.

Our team is defined by a strong commitment to improving student learning, empowering teachers, and advancing the role of high-quality assessment in expanding opportunity for all students. We are recognized leaders in assessment innovation, driven by our willingness to tackle complex challenges and our dedication to delivering exceptional support to our partners.

WHO WE’RE LOOKING FOR

SUMMARY: We are seeking a Senior Software Engineer, Scoring to design, develop, and support scalable, secure, cloud-native applications. The ideal candidate will have strong experience across backend development, modern AWS services, containerized deployments, and relational database design that supports high-stakes, high-volume data workflows.

This role will collaborate closely with product owners, business analysts, QA engineers, and DevOps teams to deliver high-quality software solutions that meet customer and business needs. Experience with educational assessment, scoring, or psychometric data is highly desirable, though not required.

This role is both strategic and hands-on. Your success will be measured by the reliability, scalability, and clarity of the platforms you help create, as well as by your influence on engineering best practices and cross-functional collaboration.

Our ideal candidate has the following traits:

• An ability to get things done: You are results-driven, action oriented, and persistent. You are a master organizer and project planner who consistently looks ahead and anticipates needs before they arise. You take initiative and are action oriented.
• Analytical: You have strong analytical skills and are comfortable reviewing quantitative data to inform your understanding of the market and customer needs and issues.
• Creative mindset: You have the ability to quickly adapt and develop creative solutions to communication and logistics challenges. You are not easily discouraged.
• Emotional intelligence: You are highly self-aware and perceptive to the dynamics of key relationships. You are positive, empathetic, flexible, and curious. You naturally gain the respect of your colleagues through your authenticity, warmth, and competence.
• Trustworthy: You are highly ethical, principled, and mission driven, garnering the trust of colleagues and vendors. You exercise discretion and confidentiality.

EXPECTED DUTIES AND RESPONSIBILITIES:

• Design and implement scalable cloud-native solutions leveraging AWS services.
• Design and maintain robust data pipelines for ingesting, transforming, validating, and publishing data from multiple internal and external systems.
• Ensure data quality, integrity, and validation through automated checks, reconciliation processes, and monitoring.
• Design solutions that support secure handling of sensitive student data, including compliance with FERPA and other applicable regulations.
• Provide thought leadership for architecture, code, security, and operational reviews.
• Drive a culture of technical excellence and continuous improvement.
• Make decisions that move the architecture forward, create best practices and patterns.
• Complete project documentation as required, including data flows, operational processes, logging status, project/data risk, mitigation detail, and level of effort for assigned work.
• Support Business Analysis, Quality Testing and participate in rapid resolution when appropriate.
• Contribute to incident response, root-cause analysis, and continuous improvement of production data systems.

REQUIREMENT AND EXPERIENCE:

• Bachelor’s degree in computer science, MIS, engineering, related field, or equivalent professional experience.
• 9+ years of professional software engineering experience with a strong focus on backend engineering, demonstrating expertise in the following: Core Java and J2EE principles, syntax, and best practices, Spring Boot, Web Services API development (SOAP and/or REST), SQL, RDBMS, JOOQ, JSON, JavaScript (ES5+), Node.js and using code versioning tools such as Git.
• Proven experience using AWS Cloud Services, such as ECS, Lambda, Fargate, Step Functions, S3, Cognito, SNS and SQS.
• Experience building and maintaining ETL/ELT pipelines using modern data tools and frameworks.
• Demonstrated experience applying software engineering best practices, including design patterns, containerization technologies (Docker) and automated testing tools (Junit, JMock, Selenium).
• Hands-on experience implementing non-functional requirements, including WCAG-compliant accessibility, application security best practices, internationalization (i18n), performance tuning and scalable system design.
• Experience implementing application monitoring, logging, and alerting strategies.
• Familiarity with data governance, lineage, and quality assurance practices.
• Experience working with large-scale, complex, or high-stakes data systems.

Highly Desirable Experience:

• Educational assessment, testing, scoring, reporting or psychometric data.
• Assessment interoperability standards (e.g., OneRoster, CASE, QTI).
• Reporting and analytics for state or district education agencies.

SALARY AND BENEFITS

We offer a competitive annual salary. Our benefits package includes:

• Medical, prescription, and behavioral health coverages.
• Dental coverage.
• Vision coverage.
• Life and AD&D coverage.
• Short-and long-term disability.
• Employee assistance program.
• 401(k) with company match.
• Up to 20 days of PTO per year.
• 17 paid holidays.
• Accrued Sick Leave
• Paid parental leave.
• Remote work and flexible schedules.

New Meridian Corporation is an equal opportunity employer and encourages individuals of all backgrounds and identities to apply. We are excited to receive applications from people in occupations or positions where they are under-represented, particularly from individuals connected to underserved communities. We feel we are strengthened by diverse perspectives.