Senior Software Engineer, Integrations - Element451

About Element451

Element451 is building an AI-powered platform that is reshaping how colleges and universities recruit, enroll, and support students. Integrations are the connective tissue that makes this platform work. In this role, you will own the data pipelines, third-party API integrations, and distributed workflows that move student data reliably at scale, with AI built into your daily work. This is an opportunity to own meaningful systems end-to-end, treat AI as a real craft, and set a new standard in this space.

The Role

This is a remote position based in Serbia. You will build integration software with full end-to-end ownership, from shaping a pipeline in planning to ensuring its stability in production. This is an explicitly AI-forward role, where AI tooling is a professional discipline applied across every phase of the work, not merely a shortcut for generating code. Senior Engineers at Element451 operate with autonomy, uphold a high bar for their work, and elevate the quality of work around them. We are transparent about this high bar because the engineers who thrive here are precisely those who seek such a challenge.

What You’ll Own

You will own the integrations you ship until they are live and correctly moving real student data. There is no separate QA function; "done" means work you have personally verified by running real customer records through the integration, not merely code that merges and runs. Day-to-day responsibilities include:

• Building and owning data pipelines and integration services designed for idempotency, safe retries, and observability from the start.
• Treating data integrity as sacred. Integrations that silently drop, duplicate, or corrupt records are worse than those that fail loudly. You will catch discrepancies before a client does, pulling in the Integrations Architect for higher-risk changes.
• Driving root causes to resolution across incidents, sync failures, and data discrepancies, rather than patching symptoms or papering over a flaky upstream API.
• Surfacing production risks early—such as schema drift, upstream API changes, rate limits, credential expiry, and partial-failure edge cases—before they become incidents.
• Generalizing fixes that benefit multiple integrations into shared libraries, escalating broad-blast-radius decisions to the relevant Principal Engineer, and driving completed work all the way to release.

On AI: You will treat code assistants, test generation, and debugging as core craft, holding AI-assisted work to the same high bar as anything you write by hand. Every output must be reviewed, tested, and owned before merge. Speed never substitutes for judgment, especially in data integrations, where plausible-looking but subtly wrong code can silently corrupt records.

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 requirements that might quietly break for the next client.
• Own the outcome. Work is considered done when it's live, validated against real data, and stable in production—not merely at merge.
• Take initiative. Move work forward and surface risks while they are 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 experience, including senior-level work on data integrations or backend services within a complex, multi-tenant SaaS product.
• Strong, current proficiency in Python for production data pipelines and integration services.
• Solid experience with MongoDB, including data modeling and query performance across flexible, document-oriented schemas at multi-tenant scale (approximately 140 client integrations).
• Experience with distributed systems, including async, queue-driven architectures, and an understanding of the realities of partial failure, retries, idempotency, eventual consistency, and backpressure.
• Experience with third-party API integrations (e.g., Student Information Systems, Stripe, PayPal, Google, Outlook), including authentication, pagination, rate limits, and graceful handling of unreliable upstreams.
• Familiarity with AWS-hosted environments (secrets management, SQS, workflow orchestration), and comfort working in an async-first, PR-based team with rotating production-reliability ownership.
• Proficiency in automated testing across layers, coupled with sound AI judgment. Production experience with OpenAI APIs or comparable LLM platforms is a plus.
• Deep, current fluency with agentic AI development tooling (e.g., Claude Code, Codex, or comparable), and excellent written communication skills that stand on their own.

Our Interview Process

Our process is rigorous and designed to provide a real signal. Expect live sessions with our engineers where you will demonstrate your work and reasoning in real-time, including how you apply AI tooling. We move quickly for the right candidates.