Software Engineer

About Medley Learning

Medley Learning is building AI for the real work of classrooms: support that helps students access rigorous learning, gives teachers time back, and earns the trust of schools. Medley is an instructional support tool for multilingual learners that helps students access grade-level content without being separated from core instruction. Our browser extension layers individualized reading and writing scaffolds directly onto the digital materials schools already use, including curriculum platforms, Google Docs, websites, and PDFs. Supports are tailored to a student's English proficiency level and home language, so students get the help they need in real time while staying engaged with the same rigorous content as their peers.

Medley supports the whole school ecosystem: students get more equitable access to grade-level work, and teachers save significant time by not having to manually create differentiated supports for every lesson. The goal is stronger student participation, reduced teacher burden, and better instructional outcomes in classrooms tasked with meeting increasingly diverse needs. Medley is grounded in research-backed practices and is already being used by over 20 districts across the US.

Medley is led by CEO Brandon Cardet-Hernandez, a former multilingual learner who has worked across K-12 as a teacher, turnaround principal, policy advisor, and edtech leader. We're backed by Workshop Ventures and advised by leading researchers.

The Opportunity

This is a hands-on engineering role on a small team where the interface is the product. Medley's scaffolds live inside a Chrome extension that sits on top of whatever a student is already reading, so the front end has to be fast, beautiful, accessible, and resilient to pages we don't control. Behind it is a data layer that's more interesting than it looks: student proficiency levels, home languages, content extracted from wildly different sources, and AI-generated supports that need to be stored, versioned, evaluated, and kept private.

We're looking for an engineer who is strongest on the front end (React, TypeScript) but thinks in systems — someone who can build a polished component and reason about where its data comes from, how it's modeled, and what happens when it scales to many classrooms. We'd love to find someone with a real eye for UI/UX who can contribute to design decisions, not just implement them.

You'll work directly with our Head of Engineering and a small, senior team, with real ownership from day one.

What You'll Do

• Build the front end. Develop and ship features in our React/TypeScript Chrome extension and web apps, with attention to performance, accessibility (WCAG), and the realities of injecting UI into third-party pages.

• Shape the user experience. Partner on UI/UX design — wireframes, interaction patterns, visual polish — and help turn rough ideas into intuitive experiences for students and teachers. Design tool experience is a plus; design instinct is essential.

• Think in systems. Understand and contribute to our data models and APIs (Node.js, MongoDB): how student, content, and scaffold data fit together, how it flows through the extension, and how we keep it correct and private.

• Expand product coverage. Help Medley work seamlessly across more websites, learning platforms, Google Workspace tools, and PDF-based materials.

• Support AI product quality. Work with the engineering team on the interfaces and data that let us evaluate and improve AI-generated scaffolds.

• Build for trust. Contribute to privacy, security, and reliability as we scale with school partners.

• Operate with ownership. Take initiative, solve problems independently, and help shape engineering culture on a small, fast-moving team.

What We're Looking For

• Strong React and TypeScript skills. You've built and shipped production front ends and care about component design, state management, and performance.

• Systems thinking. You're comfortable reading and writing backend code, and you naturally ask how data is modeled, where it lives, and how it moves — even when the task in front of you is a UI.

• Design sensibility. You notice when something feels off, can articulate why, and can propose something better. You've collaborated with (or been) the person sketching the interface.

• Product mindset. You think beyond the ticket and care about what should be built, for whom, and why.

• Execution orientation. Practical, resourceful, and able to move quickly without sacrificing quality.

• Clear communicator. You collaborate well with technical and non-technical teammates, including educators.

• Startup fit. You're energized by ambiguity and comfortable wearing multiple hats.

Nice to Have

• Chrome extension or browser-platform experience (content scripts, DOM manipulation on pages you don't control)

• Experience with Node.js, MongoDB, and AWS

• Familiarity with Figma or similar design tools

• Experience building accessible interfaces

• Experience working with LLM APIs or AI-powered products

• Empathy for education, accessibility, multilingual learners, or special education — as a learner, educator, or builder

Why Join Medley

Medley is building products for multilingual learners and students with disabilities, populations that together represent more than 20% of U.S. K-12 students and have historically been underserved by edtech.

You'll join early, work directly with founders and engineering leadership, own meaningful technical and design decisions, and help shape a product that improves access to learning for students nationwide.

We are committed to creating a diverse and inclusive work environment. We welcome applicants from all backgrounds and experiences.