Students walk into their buildings, hallways, and classrooms completely unaccounted for. As recent-ish public schoolers, we know the drill: put a backpack on, look the part, blend into the crowd. Teachers took attendance manually. They gave us blocks of wood and tissue boxes for hall passes. Finding one student meant logging into an attendance portal, calling into a classroom, and hoping. We also know what it's like to hear about a school shooting and start texting friends, wondering if you'll get a reply.
MOOV is our hope to make schools safer and seamless. It's an entirely new category in education technology: a student movement OS.
You cannot take one step into a MOOV school without noticing our impact. Anyone entering the building, a classroom, a bathroom, or a common area moves with MOOV. We are fundamentally changing the culture of schools: from one where tasks are manual, safety is an afterthought, and attendance is declining, to one where attendance is automated, accountability is increased 10,000x (yes, that's a real number), and getting to class early earns students points.
A principal at one of the biggest high schools in America was asked what would happen if MOOV were removed. He said his school could not function. Security Directors have said verbatim that MOOV "is a need, not a want." We grew 252% last year, and we're breaking into some of the country's biggest districts, all without a sales team.
Our mission is a relentless pursuit to reshape the schools that shaped us: saving time and saving lives.
MOOV is hardware and software in the same product. A student taps a card in a classroom in California. A few hundred milliseconds later, an attendance record has to be right, a hall pass has to start counting, and an administrator's dashboard has to reflect it. When it's wrong, someone is wandering in a hallway and nobody can say where.
This role is mostly backend. The interesting problems at MOOV are underneath the screen: the ingestion path that takes tap events off thousands of devices, the sync layer that reconciles them against student information systems that were not designed to be integrated with, the provisioning and fleet health of hardware sitting in buildings we don't control. Front-end work exists, and you'll do some of it. It is not why we're hiring you.
Engineering at MOOV has been deliberately small. That has kept the product coherent and fast, and it means the scope in front of you is enormous: entire surfaces of this system are unclaimed, and you will own them from your first month rather than your third year. You report to Kevin, and you build alongside him.
Own backend surfaces outright. The SIS integration layer, the event pipeline, or device provisioning and fleet health. Yours end to end, not yours to assist on. By month three Kevin should not be reviewing your work line by line, because he doesn't need to.
Make the tap path fast and correct at real school-day volume, with roster data as it actually arrives: duplicate IDs, students who transferred in March, three date formats in one file, a district that renamed every room over the summer. The messy rows are not an edge case. They are the job.
Keep the fleet honest. Readers, kiosks, and handhelds sit in buildings we don't control, on networks we didn't configure, 2,500 miles away. You'll care about what a device does when the Wi-Fi drops for six hours, and you'll be able to tell the difference between a firmware problem, a network problem, and a school that moved the Reader.
Be further out on AI than Kevin is, and he is already out there. He builds with these tools every day and reads the releases the week they land. We want the person who shows up with the thing he hasn't seen yet: a better harness, a technique that turns a two-week project into two days, an agent setup that actually holds up against a real codebase instead of a demo. If your answer to "what's changed in the last month" is what everyone else's answer is, you're not the hire.
And be able to do all of it with the tools switched off. AI is how fast you go. It is not how you think. We will sit you in front of an unfamiliar system with no assistance and expect you to read it, find the thing that's wrong, and write the correct fix. Anyone who can only operate through a model is a liability in a system where a bad write means a student is marked present in a building they aren't in.
We'd rather you hear this from us than find it in week one.
This is a young engineering organization and you are early in it. Decisions that a larger company made five years ago have not been made here yet: how we test, how we review, what our deploy process looks like as the team grows. You will be in the room for those, and in some cases you will be the one who makes them. If you want to arrive into a system where all of that is settled, this is the wrong job.
The product is live, renewing, and running in districts every school day. What it hasn't been is built by more than a handful of people. Turning it into something a growing team can move fast inside is part of what we're hiring for.
By week two: you've shipped to production. Something small and real, in front of users, without anyone holding your hand through the deploy.
By month three: you own a surface outright. You've taken something that only worked because someone knew how to hold it and made it work on its own. A district issue can be handed to you and you take it to the end.
By month six: you've made the codebase easier for the next engineer and can point at exactly what. You've killed at least one whole category of support ticket with a product change. MOOV is shipping more per week than it was the day you started, and a meaningful share of that is yours.
This is a fast-track role. We check in formally every 30 days and do a full performance review annually, and the honest ceiling on this seat is leading engineering at MOOV. We promote execution, quickly, and we'd rather build our leadership team out of people who earned it here.
You're better than us. We don't have to push you; you push us. You don't have to be told to keep up: you're asking us to keep up.
You care deeply. Not about "the platform" in the abstract, but about whether a specific kid in a specific hallway is accounted for.
You ship. You have a track record of finished things in front of real users. Side projects count. Coursework doesn't.
You're high agency. A district goes live in 14 hours, the sync is failing, and the person who owns that vendor's API is unreachable. You move. And then there is no next time, because you built the thing that catches it two weeks earlier.
You take accountability. When something breaks that wasn't technically yours, you fix it first and sort out whose it was later. You have a specific story like this ready, because it's how you already work.
You debug as a discipline. You form a hypothesis and test it. You do not change things until it works and then move on.
You're obsessively curious. You need to know how something works, and you won't settle for a non-answer. A device that won't provision is interesting to you, not someone else's problem.
You scope before you execute. Handed something unfamiliar, your first move is finding out what it actually is, not two confident hours in the wrong direction.
Your questions have specifics in them. "The eSchool sync dropped 40 students last night and they're all from one building that was renamed in the SIS. Is room mapping keyed on name or ID? If it's ID, I can fix it now, but tell me if something else depends on that."
You use AI as leverage and own the output. If a prompt misses something, that's your miss, not the tool's. You can tell us about a time AI got something wrong and you caught it, because you were checking.
You're confident without needing to win. You'll push back on Kevin with evidence, and take a "no" without wilting or sulking.
When a problem repeats, you build the fix instead of getting faster at the answer.
You ask who it's for and what happens when it's wrong before you ask what to build.
You're legible to people who don't write code. You'll sit ten feet from the people who talk to districts every day, and they need to understand you.
You're credible in a school building. Some of this work happens on site, in front of a technology director who has been sold to before.
You have 1–3 years shipping software professionally, or a shorter track record with unusually strong evidence of things you finished and put in front of users.
Helpful, not required: you've touched firmware, IoT, RFID or NFC, or device fleets. You've built against a messy institutional system with a committee behind it. You've been a first or second engineer somewhere.
This job is in our Brooklyn office at 15 MetroTech Center, five days a week, 7am to 7pm. Why 7am? That's when our schools start. Why 7pm? That's when schools on the West Coast end. When something breaks, it breaks during a school day, and the engineer is not asleep for it. You'll also be out at schools with us several times a month, travel covered.
We are flexible and accommodating, but we are not aiming to be good, or even great. We will be the greatest system a school has ever used. Lives are on the line. We believe we can help prevent the next school tragedy. This is what it takes.
We'll offer you a choice between three packages: more cash and less equity, more equity and less cash, or somewhere in the middle.
Base: $150,000 – $190,000
Equity: 0.30% – 0.50%
Ability to early-exercise stock options for tax benefits
Health, dental, and vision coverage
Lunch every day, and dinner if you're here late
Daily commuter stipend; school and conference travel covered
Unlimited PTO
Access to whatever tools you need, plus a monthly book budget
Regular team offsites
Relocation stipend if you're moving to New York for this
Intro call, 25 minutes with Kevin.
In person with Kevin, a conversation, not a presentation: walk us through one thing you built end to end and one bug you solely caused, in real detail. We want to see how you think out loud, in a room, face to face.
A paid day in our office. You spend a full day with us building against a real MOOV problem: a stream of tap events, a roster file with the messiness ours actually have, and a question the product has to answer correctly. We pay for your time because we're asking for real work. Ask us as many questions as you want, meet the team, and walk us through what you built at the end of the day. This is the part we weigh most heavily, and it's the part where you find out whether you want to work here.
References, then an offer, usually within 48 hours of your day with us.
We are inviting you to answer two questions. Please note the following:
You should respond to all questions in English.
Keep your responses brief. Audio answers should take no longer than three minutes each.
You have unlimited retakes available for audio questions. But remember that your production quality (microphone, setup, environment, etc.) has no bearing on our decision to hire you. We only want to see how you will respond to these questions, so keep it simple and don't stress!
If you have any issues with uploading your audio, try using your mobile data connection. If the issues persist, contact Hirevire support via chat (see the red button located at the bottom right-hand side of the screen).