Senior Software Engineer, Integrations

**Element451** Element451 is building the AI-powered platform reshaping how colleges and universities recruit, enroll, and support students — and integrations are the connective tissue that makes it work. You’ll own the data pipelines, third-party API integrations, and distributed workflows that move student data reliably at scale, with AI built into how you work. It’s a chance to own meaningful systems end to end, treat AI as real craft, and set the standard others in this space measure themselves against. ## **The Role** You’ll build integration software with full end-to-end ownership — from shaping a pipeline in planning to keeping it stable in production. This is an explicitly AI-forward role: AI tooling is a professional discipline applied across every phase of the work, not a shortcut for generating code. Senior Engineers operate with autonomy, hold their work to a high bar, and lift the quality of the work around them. We’re upfront about that bar because the engineers who thrive here want exactly that. ## **What You’ll Own** You own the integrations you ship until they’re live and moving real student data correctly. There’s no separate QA function: “done” means work you’ve verified yourself by running real customer records through the integration — not code that merely merges and runs. Day to day, that looks like: - Build and own data pipelines and integration services designed for idempotency, safe retries, and observability from the start. - Treat data integrity as sacred — integrations that silently drop, duplicate, or corrupt records are worse than ones that fail loudly — and catch discrepancies before a client does, pulling in the Integrations Architect on higher-risk changes. - Drive root causes to resolution across incidents, sync failures, and data discrepancies, rather than patching symptoms or papering over a flaky upstream API. - Surface production risks early — schema drift, upstream API changes, rate limits, credential expiry, partial-failure edge cases — before they become incidents. - Generalize fixes that help more than one integration into shared libraries, escalate broad-blast-radius decisions to the relevant Principal Engineer, and drive completed work all the way to release. **On AI: you treat code assistants, test generation, and debugging as core craft, and hold AI-assisted work to the same bar as anything you write by hand — every output reviewed, tested, and owned before merge. Speed never substitutes for judgment, especially in data integrations, where plausible-looking but subtly wrong code corrupts records silently.** ## **How You’ll Show Up** We hire for behavior as much as experience. These are the values we live by and hire for: - **Understand the “why” before the “what.”** Grasp the real problem before building, and question a requirement that will quietly break for the next client. - **Own the outcome.** It’s done when it’s live, validated against real data, and stable in production — not at merge. - **Take initiative.** Move work forward and surface risks while they’re still cheap to fix, without waiting to be told. - **Solve problems together.** Share openly and treat feedback as a professional input; the best solutions come from the team. ## **What You Bring** - 5+ years of software engineering, including senior-level work on data integrations or backend services in a complex, multi-tenant SaaS product. - Strong, current Python for production data pipelines and integration services. - Solid MongoDB — data modeling and query performance across flexible, document-oriented schemas at multi-tenant scale (~140 client integrations). - Distributed systems — async, queue-driven architectures and the realities of partial failure, retries, idempotency, eventual consistency, and backpressure. - Third-party API integrations (Student Information Systems, Stripe, PayPal, Google, Outlook) — auth, pagination, rate limits, and graceful handling of unreliable upstreams. - AWS-hosted environments (secr…