Senior Full-Stack + DevOps Engineer

About the Role
Location: Austin, TX | In-office, with flexibility
This role is based in Austin, Texas, and is primarily an in-office position. We value collaboration and in-person connection while offering flexibility in how and when work gets done.
The American Federation for Children is the nation’s leading school choice advocacy organization, working to ensure that every child - regardless of zip code or family income - has access to the education that is right for them. Through the AFC Scholarship Fund, we are building the national infrastructure for the Education Freedom Tax Credit, a landmark program that empowers families to choose the schools and learning environments where their children can thrive.
This is an You will work within small, cross-functional pods that typically bring together a Product Manager, engineering, and Operations/CI capabilities. Pods own defined products or platform capabilities from discovery through production and ongoing improvement - spanning partner-facing experiences, internal tools, and the platform services that connect them. You will report directly to the Senior Director, Digital Platforms & User Experience.
As the Full-Stack + DevOps Engineer within a pod, you will be responsible for technical execution across the application stack and will bring deeper infrastructure and deployment expertise to the team. DevOps is a shared engineering capability rather than a silo: you will partner with Operations/CI to establish repeatable deployment, monitoring, security, and reliability practices rather than becoming a gatekeeper for every release. As AFC grows its engineering organization, you will help set the technical patterns that let multiple pods build independently without fragmenting the architecture.
What You’ll Own
You will hold technical ownership for the products your pod builds, while sharing delivery responsibility with your Product Manager and Operations/CI partners.
Web Applications & Platform Services
Designing and building web applications and platform services from first prototype to production.
Contributing to the AFC Partner Portal - a Next.js / TypeScript / Convex application hosted on Vercel, with Clerk for authentication and Sentry for monitoring.
Building clean, accessible front ends and reliable back-end services and APIs.
Designing and building AI-powered features - including LLM-powered tools, chatbots, and AI-assisted workflows - where they add real value.
Infrastructure & DevOps
Within your pod, you will provide technical ownership of the infrastructure supporting the products your team builds, partnering closely with Operations/CI to establish shared standards, automation, and release practices across AFC’s platform. This includes:
Building, deploying, and troubleshooting your pod’s services across dev, staging, and production on AWS and Vercel.
Contributing to CI/CD pipelines (GitHub Actions) and infrastructure-as-code (Terraform, Docker) - working with Operations/CI to build the paved road every pod can use.
Instrumenting your applications with monitoring, logging, and alerting so issues are caught before users notice them.
Applying shared security practices - authentication, access control, secrets management, and dependency updates.
Bringing infrastructure expertise to pod decisions on reliability, performance, and scalability.
Systems Integration
Build and maintain custom APIs and integrations between AFC applications and third-party platforms.
Handle the details that make integrations dependable - authentication, pagination, rate limits, retries, error handling, and logging.
Support data pipelines and data quality checks that feed reporting and day-to-day operations.
Product, Team & Partner Collaboration
Partner closely with your Product Manager to translate product goals and business requirements into technical approaches, scope work, identify tradeoffs, and deliver iteratively.
Work directly with designers, program staff, and stakeholders to understand needs and validate solutions.
Serve as a technical point of contact for third-party vendors, agencies, and platform providers - leading integration work (API contracts, data formats, timelines, and testing) and reviewing partner-delivered code for quality, security, and architectural fit.
Evaluate new tools and vendors and make clear build-vs-buy recommendations.
Step in to support other pods and projects as priorities shift.
What We’re Looking For
We are looking for a senior engineer who is as comfortable architecting a system as they are writing the code to build it - and who does their best work as part of a small team. The right candidate brings technical depth across the full stack, real infrastructure expertise, a strong instinct for how systems connect, and the initiative to improve things without being asked.
Engineering & Infrastructure
6+ years of full-stack engineering experience with demonstrated ownership of both front-end and back-end systems.
Proficiency in React and Next.js - the Partner Portal is built on this stack and you will be expected to contribute to it.
Strong TypeScript skills and comfort working in a modern, type-checked codebase.
Back-end experience with Node.js and RESTful APIs.
Hands-on AWS experience - we use AWS heavily across our infrastructure and this is a core requirement.
CI/CD pipeline experience: GitHub Actions, environment management, deployment tooling, infrastructure-as-code (e.g., Terraform, Docker), and technical QA that catches integration failures before release.
Integrations & Data
Strong API integration experience - authentication, pagination, rate limits, retries, error handling, and logging.
Strong SQL skills and experience with relational databases and cloud data stores.
Experience with webhooks and server-side event implementation.
Collaboration & Partner Management
Experience working in cross-functional product teams alongside Product Managers and operations or platform partners.
Proven experience working directly with third-party vendors, agencies, or platform providers on technical deliverables.
Ability to work across technical and non-technical stakeholders, translating between business needs and engineering decisions.
Clear written and verbal communication - you document your work and keep others informed without being asked.
Mindset & Ways of Working
Fluency using AI tools as a development accelerator - you architect and direct; AI executes. AI-assisted development is not a bonus here; it’s how you already work.
Self-starter with a strong bias toward action - you identify problems, propose solutions, and move without waiting to be asked.
Flexibility to move across pods and projects as needs change, and comfort in a fast-moving environment where the work is not always fully defined.

Work arrangement
No