Company: Common Good Learning Tools (CGLT)

Title: Software Engineer – Quality & Infrastructure
Location: Remote, preference for candidates located in one of these states: CA, GA, IL, NJ, NC, OR, PA, TN, WA, WI
Employment Type: Full-time, W2
Compensation: $120,000 to $150,000, commensurate with experience

About Common Good Learning Tools

Common Good Learning Tools (CGLT) builds digital tools that help public K–12 agencies improve teaching and learning. Grounded in learning science and focused on educational impact, CGLT develops three products: Satchel, a platform for managing competencies and learning standards; Cureum, a platform for curating and sharing educational resources; and Sparkl, a feedback-driven teaching and learning tool.

About the Role

CGLT is looking for a Software Engineer – Quality & Infrastructure, to help ensure its software is well-tested and ready for production. Working across engineering and product, you’ll review code, write and improve automated tests, test product behavior, and help manage releases. You’ll also partner with the CTO to strengthen CI/CD pipelines, deployment tooling, and infrastructure.

This is a software engineering role, not a traditional QA position or a pure DevOps role. As testing and quality practices mature, you may spend less time on hands-on product testing and more time on engineering work, including infrastructure and feature development. We’re open to a strong mid-level engineer who can implement a proposed design or a senior engineer who can design solutions to broader problems.

Crucially, we are looking for someone who both has the technical chops to own our QA testing pipeline, but who is also able to understand our products from the end-user perspective, and work with our Product Manager and Founder to ensure that all new functionality we release is both technically performant and also meets the needs of our partners.

In addition, we need someone who understands and is comfortable with the fact that CGLT is a small and non-traditional company: all of our job roles are constantly evolving, and to be comfortable working with us you need to be accepting of an ambiguous job description and excited about the opportunity to tackle new things whenever they come up.

Key Responsibilities

Review pull requests from engineering and product perspectives. Evaluate changes for correctness, maintainability, edge cases, potential regressions, and whether the resulting behavior meets product expectations.
Test features and bug fixes before release. Explore changes in development or preview environments, document issues clearly, and work with developers to resolve them.
Build a strong understanding of our products. Learn how people use them so you can spot gaps between technically correct code and the experience a feature is meant to deliver.
Identify and close automated testing gaps. Review new and existing code for behaviors that need protection, then write and maintain unit, component, integration, and end-to-end tests.
Choose the right testing approach. Help the team decide what belongs at each testing layer, prioritizing useful, reliable tests over test counts or coverage percentages alone.
Reduce reliance on manual QA. Turn recurring checks, reported bugs, and regressions into automated tests, while improving testing patterns, tooling, and developer experience.
Strengthen the development pipeline. Work with the CTO to establish and improve CI/CD pipelines and quality practices that help engineers test and release changes with confidence.
Own release quality. Coordinate routine application releases, verify that changes work as expected after deployment, and help troubleshoot failed deployments or production issues.
Improve infrastructure and engineering workflows. Partner with the CTO on development and preview environments, deployment tooling, and infrastructure design, taking on greater design ownership as your experience allows.
Contribute as a software engineer across the stack. When quality, testing, and release priorities are covered, build features, fix bugs, and improve existing frontend and backend systems alongside the engineering team.

Requirements

Strong software engineering skills. You can read, write, and review production code, communicate clearly with other engineers, and work across application code, testing, and infrastructure.
Hands-on automated testing experience. You’ve written tests using testing frameworks or libraries. Familiarity with unit or component testing libraries, end-to-end frameworks, improving test suites, or turning recurring manual checks into automated tests.
Quality-minded code review. You can assess changes for correctness, maintainability, edge cases, and potential regressions, and work constructively with developers when changes need refinement.
Product-level judgment. You’re willing to learn how the products should behave, test changes from a user’s perspective, and recognize when technically correct code does not produce the intended result.
Comfort working across disciplines. You’re interested in improving testing and release practices while continuing to contribute as a software engineer. This is neither a testing-only nor an infrastructure-only position.
Experience appropriate to your level. Mid-level candidates should be able to implement a proposed engineering or infrastructure design. Senior candidates should be able to take a problem and design the solution.

Preferred

Relevant languages and frameworks. Our current stack is based on JavaScript/TypeScript, Vue, and PHP, so experience with these exact languages/frameworks, or at least similar cousins, is essential. We are also exploring migrations to other languages/frameworks, so the ability to transition to something new if necessary is also important.
CI/CD and developer tooling. Experience improving build and deployment pipelines, test automation, development environments, or the tools engineers use to ship code.
Infrastructure experience. Familiarity with AWS, Linux-based systems, or infrastructure work as a software engineer. Nix/NixOS experience would be valuable but is not expected.
Modernization experience. Experience improving legacy systems or supporting a transition between technologies, particularly relevant as the team moves away from PHP.

Why Join CGLT:

Make a direct impact. Help shape product quality, testing practices, infrastructure, and architecture in a role with meaningful ownership.
Work closely with a small team. Collaborate directly with engineering and product colleagues and have a voice in technical decisions.
Spend more time building. Enjoy minimal meeting overhead, flexible working hours, and a focus on getting good engineering work done.
Improve systems as you go. Work across established products, modernization efforts, and new development, with room to make processes and tools better when you see an opportunity.
Work remotely. The role is US-remote, with a preference for states where CGLT already employs people (states listed above)
Receive a benefits package. CGLT offers a $15,000 annual benefits stipend (paid as additional earnings and/or applied to selected benefit plans), insurance options, and unlimited PTO.
Share in company success. A company-performance-based year-end bonus may be available; it is not guaranteed but could be up to approximately 10% of salary.
Base pay: $120,000 to $150,000, commensurate with experience

Common Good Learning Tools is an equal opportunity employer, and all qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, age, sex, national origin, disability status, genetics, protected veteran status, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, or any other characteristic protected by federal, state or local laws.