Product Engineer

As Swing's Product Engineer, you'll find the problems worth solving across our business, decide what to build, and build it, reporting to the VP of Engineering. This isn't a traditional engineering seat: there's no PM → Designer → Engineer handoff, and you'll work directly with Product, Operations, Customer Success, Sales, and Finance to take problems from first conversation to shipped software. You'll build full-stack features for school administrators and substitute teachers, the operational systems that run our marketplace, and the automations and AI agents that replace manual work. AI is central to how you work, not just what you ship, and the role is designed so one person with the right tools can do what used to take a team. If you want to own problems end to end and see your work keep students learning, keep reading.

Keys to Success in This Role

Full-stack engineering with a shipping record: You have 3+ years of software engineering or equivalent hands-on product building, and you've shipped real products that customers use. Here you'll work across the stack, from features school administrators and subs use every day to billing, timekeeping, configuration, integrations, and admin tools.

An AI-native way of working: Tools like Claude Code, n8n, and other AI and automation tools are the core of your workflow, and you keep experimenting to increase your leverage. You'll be expected to turn an idea into something users can interact with in hours or days, not weeks.

Product judgment: You ask why before deciding how. Without waiting on a PM, you'll define requirements, set scope, make UX and product tradeoffs, and decide when something is ready to ship.

Turning ambiguity into working software: Problems will reach you loosely defined, from teams across the business. You dig in, work out what's actually needed, and build a solution that works.

Automating operations: You spot repetitive manual workflows and replace them with software, AI agents, APIs, MCP, or tools like n8n. Hands-on experience building with LLM APIs, agents, or AI-powered workflows is what lets you do this well.

Clear communication and measurable results: You explain tradeoffs plainly to non-technical teammates and in depth to engineers, collaborating during U.S. business hours. You use data and user feedback to show whether what you built actually solved the problem.

Founder or early-startup experience is a plus: Having built a product or startup yourself, been an early engineer, or taken on PM responsibilities will help you hit the ground running. So will examples where AI let you accomplish what previously required several people.

What You'll Work With

You'll need hands-on experience with React for building user interfaces in JavaScript or TypeScript, working with REST APIs to connect systems, and using SQL and relational databases to query and shape data. Those are the core of the stack you'll touch every day.

Experience with any of these will let you move faster: Clojure or another Lisp, since much of our backend is Clojure; Datomic, the database we use for our core application data; AWS infrastructure, where our systems run; or building browser extensions, which we use to extend third-party platforms our customers rely on. If you haven't worked with these, you'll pick them up as you go.

Why You're Excited About This Job

The mission: The average student spends six months of their K-12 career with a substitute teacher. What you build helps schools get coverage quickly and keeps student learning on track.

End-to-end ownership: You decide what to build, build it, and measure whether it worked. No handoffs, no waiting on a spec.

A mandate to define AI-native work: We're rethinking how we build products and run the business in an AI-native world, and you'll help shape what that looks like at Swing.

Leverage by design: This role is built around the idea that AI lets one person accomplish what once took a team, and you'll push that idea as far as it goes.

The full inside of a marketplace: You'll build for both sides of a two-sided marketplace and for its operational core: billing, timekeeping, integrations, and admin tools.

Cross-functional exposure: You'll partner directly with Product, Operations, Customer Success, Sales, and Finance, and see the business from every seat.

Visible impact: Every workflow you automate and every feature you ship changes how our team and our customers work, and you'll have the data to prove it.

About Swing Education

Swing Education is an online staffing marketplace that connects substitute teachers with K-12 schools. Founded in 2015 by former K-12 educators and administrators, Swing makes it easier for schools and districts to find reliable, qualified substitute teachers when they need them most. We recruit, screen, and support a large community of substitute teachers, and we build technology that helps schools get coverage quickly.

We believe substitute teachers play an integral role in education; the average student spends six months of their K-12 time with a sub. With millions of absence days filled to date, we're dedicated to improving the experience of finding substitute teachers, becoming a sub, and keeping student learning on track.

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Swing Education is unable to provide employment visa sponsorship, including H-1B sponsorship, for this position. Applicants must be currently authorized to work in the United States on a full-time basis without current or future sponsorship.

Salary is commensurate on experience and is adjusted for cost of living standards dependent on position location. Swing Education offers a comprehensive benefits package which includes the following perks:

Medical/dental/vision benefits

Flexible Time Off (FTO)

Paid holidays

Parental leave

Stock options

Professional development reimbursement program

Co-working membership reimbursement

Mission-driven work

Fun, collaborative, balanced culture

COMPENSATION:

$110,000 — $130,000 USD