Staff Software Engineer (Java)

HMH is a learning technology company committed to delivering connected solutions that engage learners, empower educators and improve student outcomes. As a leading provider of K–12 core curriculum, supplemental and intervention solutions, and professional learning services, HMH partners with educators and school districts to uncover solutions that unlock students’ potential and extend teachers’ capabilities.

HMH serves more than 50 million students and 4 million educators in 150 countries. For more information, visit www.hmhco.com

Staff Software Engineers are the technology leaders of our highest impact projects. Your high energy is contagious, you actively collaborate with others across the engineering organization, and you seek to learn as much as you like to teach. You personify the notion of constant improvement as you work with your team and the larger engineering group to build software that delivers on our mission. You use your extraordinary technical competence to ensure a high bar for excellence while you mentor other engineers on their own path towards craftsmanship. You are most likely T-shaped, with broad knowledge across many technologies plus strong skills in a specific area. Staff Software Engineers embrace the opportunity to represent HMH in industry groups and open-source communities.

Area of Responsibility:

You will be working on the HMH Educational Online/Digital Learning Platform. The team builds highly scalable and available platform using Microservices Architecture, Java microservices backend, REACT JavaScript UI Frontend, REST APIs, Postgres Database, AWS Cloud technologies, AWS Kafka, Kubernetes or Mesos orchestration, DataDog for logging/monitoring/alerting, Concourse CI or Jenkins, Maven etc.. You will need experience in Agent AI development and proficiency in using AI-assisted engineering tools like OpenAI Codex, Windsurf, and similar platforms. The ideal candidate will be responsible for leading a team of developers and AI engineers to build intelligent, autonomous, and highly scalable solutions leveraging cutting-edge AI technologies.

Responsibilities:

• Be the technical lead for feature development in a team of 5-10 engineers and influencing the technical direction of the overall engineering organization.
• Decompose business objectives into valuable, incrementally releasable user features accurately estimating the effort to complete each.
• Contribute code to feature development efforts demonstrating to others efficient design, delivery and testing patterns and techniques.
• Review and structre code generated code by AI agents as well as developed by team
• Work on incorporating business logic, integration points and other conditions not captured by the agents in the generated code.
• Strive for high quality outcomes, continuously look for ways to improve team productivity and product reliability, performance, and security.
• Develop the talents and abilities of peers and colleagues. Create a memorable legacy as you progress toward your personal and professional objectives.
• Foster your personal and professional development continually seeking assignments that challenge you.

Skills & Experience

Successful Candidates must demonstrate an appropriate combination of:

• 6 – 10+ years of experience as a software engineer.
• 3+ years of experience as a Staff or lead software engineer.
• Bachelor's degree in computer science or a STEM field.
• A portfolio of thought leadership and individual technical accomplishments.
• Full understanding of Agile software development methodologies and practices.
• Good exposure to AI Agentic development and reated tools
• Strong communication skills — both verbal and written.
• Extensive experience working with technologies and concepts such:

                o Behavior-driven or test-driven development

                o JVM-based languages such as Java and Scala

                o Development frameworks such as Spring Boot

                o Asynchronous programming concepts, including Event processing

                o Database technologies such as SQL, Postgres/MySQL, AWS Aurora DBs, Redshift, Liquibase or Flyway

                o No-SQL technologies such as Redis, MongoDB and Cassandra

                o Streaming technologies such as Apache Kafka, Apache Spark or Amazon Kinesis

                o Unit-testing frameworks such as jUnit

                o Performance testing frameworks such as Gatling

                o Architectural concepts such as micro-services and separation of concerns

                o Expert knowledge of class-based, object-oriented programming and design patterns

                o Development tools such as GitHub, Jira, Jenkins, Concourse, and Maven

                o Cloud technologies such as AWS and Azure

                o Hands-on expertise with AI-powered development tools like Codex, Windsurf, GitHub Copilot, or similar.

                o Data Center Operating Technologies such as Kubernetes, Apache Mesos Apache Aurora, and TerraForm and container services such as Docker and Kubernetes

                o Monitoring and operational data analysis practices and tools such as DataDog, Splunk and ELK

The Information Technology organization is transforming to realize our mission: Become a leader in HMH’s digital transformation, and as a strategic partner, innovate and deliver highest value, competitive advantage solutions across all corporate and business functions. Our ambition is to be a digital leader through innovation and develop and deliver leading edge technology such as robotic process automation and artificial intelligence to solve some of HMH’s greatest operational business challenges. Our professionals will have business relevant skills to connect our HMH partners to technologies that propel the businesses to deliver the greatest value for HMH and our customers.

We are building a team of IT professionals with an insatiable appetite to learn, a relentless focus on customer service, a technological curiosity toward future possibilities, and a creativity in solving business challenges with leading technologies. Our team will find ways to work together, create a sense of community where it’s safe to take risks and learn together, develop our careers, and all have an opportunity to work on new technologies. We will work together, learn together and have fun together. As a team, we will lead HMH’s digital transformation.