Design, build, and deploy scalable backend services and APIs. Mentor junior engineers and improve technical practices. Collaborate with teams.
About Us
Lirvana Labs is an early-stage, VC-backed ed-tech startup turning the dream of truly personalized learning into everyday reality. Backed by Kapor Capital and other mission-aligned investors, with design and development partners such as Sesame Workshop, TNTP, Educators Rising, Stanford University’s Deliberative Democracy Lab, MIT Solve and MIT Raise, we are racing toward our next horizon of impact and ground-breaking use of AI to push the envelope in learning, teaching and coaching.
Our flagship suite combines Yeti Confetti Kids—a playful AI tutor that adapts on the fly—with a Teacher Co-Pilot Portal that delivers real-time insights and one-click actions for educators. Under the hood, we’re pushing LLMs to the edge of what’s possible in recommendation, session planning, and formative feedback, ensuring each student gets just-right challenges while teachers stay firmly in the loop.
We’re gearing up to expand our elementary literacy, math and SEL programming success beyond K12, with new and existing market expansion across APAC, the Middle East, and the U.S. Join us if you’d rather build the future of education than wait for it.
About the Role
We are seeking an experienced and passionate Senior Software Engineer to join our dynamic engineering team. In this role, you will be instrumental in designing, building, and deploying scalable, high-performance services that power our core products. If you are a Java expert with a love for tackling complex problems in a cloud-native environment, we'd love to meet you!
What You’ll Do
Design & Develop: Architect, design, and implement robust, scalable backend services and APIs using Java and the Spring Boot framework.
Lead & Mentor: Take ownership of major features from conception to deployment. Mentor junior engineers through code reviews, pair programming, and technical guidance.
Deploy & Operate: Build and maintain our cloud infrastructure on Google Cloud Platform (GCP). You'll be responsible for deploying and managing applications using Kubernetes.
Innovate & Improve: Drive technical excellence and innovation within the team. Identify and address performance bottlenecks, and advocate for best practices in coding, testing, and security.
Collaborate: Work closely with product managers, designers, and other engineers to deliver high-quality features that meet user needs and business goals.
What You’ll Bring
- 5+ years of professional software development experience with expert-level proficiency in Java and the Spring Boot framework.
- Exceptional skills in object-oriented programming, concurrency, multithreading, and debugging.
- Deep experience designing and building distributed, fault-tolerant computing architectures (e.g., microservices).
- Proven experience building and consuming both RESTful APIs and gRPC services.
- Strong, hands-on experience with Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and container orchestration using Kubernetes.
- A proven track record of delivering high-quality software within a full Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC), including continuous integration (CI).
- A strong working knowledge of Linux/Unix environments.
- A Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science or a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience.
Even Better If You Have
- Hands-on experience with FoundationDB or other distributed NoSQL databases.
- Experience with CI/CD pipelines (e.g., Github Actions, Jenkins, GitLab CI, Google Cloud Build).
- Familiarity with event-driven architectures and messaging systems like Pub/Sub, Kafka or RabbitMQ.
- Familiarity with integrating or working with Large Language Models (LLMs).
Why You’ll Love Working Here
- High Impact: Career-defining chance to architect cutting edge applications and cloud platforms from the ground-up.
- Professional Growth: Deepen your expertise in cloud architecture, microservices design, AI, and automation.
- Collaborative Culture: Join a cross-functional team that values transparency, continuous learning, and knowledge sharing.
Next Steps
Ready to apply? We’d love to hear from you. To help us understand your experience, please include a brief note in your application describing a challenging project you’ve worked on involving scaling high-performance microservices. We're particularly interested in your role and the technical decisions you helped make.
Our Hiring Philosophy
We know that the "perfect" candidate doesn't exist, and that skills can be learned. We're more interested in your passion for this work, your potential, and what you can add to our team. If you believe you have what it takes, but don't meet every single bullet point, please apply anyway!
Top Skills
Ci/Cd
Google Cloud Platform (Gcp)
Grpc
Java
Kubernetes
Linux/Unix
Restful Apis
Spring Boot
Lirvana Labs Menlo Park, California, USA Office
101 Jefferson Dr, Menlo Park, CA, United States, 94025
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