Senior Software Engineer

Senior Software Engineer - Data Migrations (Remote Contractor, Brazil)

About the Role

We're hiring two Senior Software Engineers as remote contractors to help design and build the internal tooling that will power our large-scale migration from Classic to the new Kuali Platform versions of our products.

You'll be focused on data-heavy engineering: building frameworks, services, and utilities that make it safe, observable, and repeatable to move customer data between generations of our products. Our stack for this work is and Postgres, and you'll be working with both schema-based and schema-less applications (e.g., relational data plus JSON/NoSQL-style payloads) that need to be analyzed, transformed, and migrated.

We're a remote-first, results-driven team that values impact over hours. Fridays are kept flexible to wrap up anything outstanding, and success in this role is measured by the results you deliver and the impact you create—not by time spent online.

Who are we?

Kuali builds software solutions for higher education. We help our customers — colleges & universities — focus on providing a fantastic education to students by decreasing their administrative costs. We work in a competitive space, ripe for innovation, with users ready to be delighted. We are poised for high growth.

Our Culture

As a company, we are guided by our cultural values:

• Iterate to evolve
• Cultivate openness
• Act with accountability
• Assume the best
• Practice humility
• Deliver amazing experiences
• Drive outcomes

At Kuali, we learn from and teach each other, we practice transparency and empathy, we delight in delivering value to our customers, and we WIN

We've embraced distributed work for years—it's part of who we are. Many of our employees work remotely across the U.S., from Massachusetts to Seattle, while others collaborate in person at our office locations. We're intentional about creating a healthy, connected culture no matter where you work.

What You'll Do

In this role, you will:

• Design and build internal migration tooling in and Postgres to support moving data from Classic to new Platform versions of our products.
• Create reusable frameworks to define and execute migration plans (schemas, mappings, transformation rules, validation steps).
• Work with both relational and schema-less data (e.g., JSON/NoSQL structures) and design safe ways to transform and load them into new models.
• Implement robust observability into migration runs (logging, metrics, dashboards, tracing) to make runs debuggable and auditable.
• Design for idempotency, replayability, and rollback so migrations can be retried safely and failures are easy to investigate.
• Collaborate with product and engineering teams to understand domain models and migration requirements, then turn them into robust tools and workflows.
• Contribute to data modeling, performance tuning, and query optimization in Postgres to handle large datasets efficiently.
• Use tests and automation to ensure migration logic is correct, resilient, and maintainable over time.
• Participate in code reviews, architecture discussions, and continuous improvement of our internal tooling ecosystem.

About you

We're looking for curious, enthusiastic, empathetic engineers who love working with data and building the tools others rely on.

You:

• Have 3+ years of professional software engineering experience building web or backend applications.
• Have demonstrable experience with data-heavy systems—migrations, ETL, integration tooling, reporting platforms, or similar.
• Are comfortable working across the stack but are especially strong on the backend and data layer.
• Understand how to build solutions with an agile, iterative approach, and you like collaborating closely with other engineers and stakeholders.
• Care deeply about correctness, safety, and reliability, especially when dealing with customer data.
• Are comfortable owning complex systems end-to-end—from design through deployment and ongoing improvements.
• Use tests (unit, integration, regression) to validate your work and don't rely on others to catch basic issue

Required Skills:

• Location: Based in Brazil, working as a remote contractor in near-shore time zones.
• Language: Fluent in English (spoken and written).
• Backend: Strong experience with (TypeScript/JavaScript).
• Database: Strong experience with relational databases, ideally Postgres (schema design, query optimization, migrations).
• Data & Tooling:
• Experience building internal tools, migration frameworks, ETL pipelines, or other data-intensive systems.
• Comfort working with schema-less data (e.g., JSON structures, flexible document models) and mapping them to structured schemas.
• Cloud: Experience with AWS or another major cloud provider.
• Engineering Practices:
• Strong troubleshooting and debugging skills.
• Solid testing habits and code quality standards.
• Experience with CI/CD workflows.

We'd be delighted if you bring experience with:

• Experience with NoSQL or document databases (e.g., Elasticsearch, MongoDB, or similar).
• Experience with logging and observability tooling (structured logging, metrics, tracing, dashboards).
• Experience with Elixir or interest in learning it on the job.
• Background in data migrations, legacy system modernization, or large-scale platform upgrades.
• Experience owning and maintaining complex, long-lived internal systems.

How We Work:

• Remote-first & results-driven: We care about the outcomes you deliver, not the hours you're online.
• Collaborative culture: We practice transparency, empathy, and assume the best in one another.
• Continuous learning: We know great developers can learn new tools; what matters is your ability to reason about systems, data, and trade-offs.

Perks

• Remote-first and results-driven
• 4 Day work week
• Competitive fixed monthly pay
• Space to work on self-driven projects during quarterly "hack weeks"

Kuali has been voted a top place to work for 9 years by the Salt Lake Tribune. In 2024 TIME Magazine honored us by naming Kuali to their list of the World's Top EdTech Companies, ranking us #99 overall and #37 in the US.

At Kuali, we value and respect individuals from all backgrounds, recognizing that a rich tapestry of experiences and perspectives fuels our success as a company and enriches our collective human experience.