Senior Platform Developer

About Stemble

Stemble is a proudly PEI-based EdTech startup reimagining how students learn in higher education. Our product is a highly sophisticated teaching and learning platform that connects students, instructors, and teaching assistants in a collaborative learning environment powered by AI. The software combines the functionality of a course management system with a homework platform, offering automated grading (using AI and algorithmic grading) and unique feedback at scale. Students get a personalized, modern learning experience that actually meets them where they’re at.

How We Work

We’re a problem-focused team. Projects are pitched with a heavy emphasis on why and light on how, and it’s expected that the dev team will find the right solution. Design, both UX and system architecture, is part of the work, not a handoff.

We break things down into small increments that solve only what is needed. We’re a small team with a quickly growing user base, and there’s a lot we could build, so we’re deliberate about not wasting time on things we aren’t sure will be necessary. Each cycle, we look at an array of possible projects and select just a subset. We have a strong vision and guiding themes for each quarter, but no big long-term roadmap.

We triage incoming customer support requests and bug reports weekly, and the dev team is part of working through them. You should be comfortable digging into a production issue, finding the root cause, and seeing it through to resolution. Occasional customer calls happen, but you’re not expected to be heavily involved in that side.

The Role

We’re hiring a senior platform developer to join our product team of 5. This role is about taking real ownership of platform and security work as the company grows.

You’ll spend most of your time on the parts of the system that aren’t visible to end users including the AWS infrastructure that runs the platform, the Laravel services that power our LMS integrations, the MySQL schemas that need to stay fast as we grow, the monitoring and alerting that tells us when something’s wrong, and the security architecture that lets us keep growing in higher education. You’ll work closely with Stemble’s Security Team to triage and prioritize vulnerabilities and security findings, and to build improvements into the platform over time. You’ll also contribute to backend feature work with our product team, particularly when it touches platform, security, or integration concerns, which, given where we are as a company, is often.

We recently completed our first SOC 2 Type 2 audit and are continuing to mature our security and compliance posture. Security-minded thinking is a requirement, not a “nice-to-have”.

Examples of Things You’ll Work On

• Backend feature and bug work in our Laravel + Doctrine codebase
• Database maintenance and query optimization
• Re-architecting for stronger multi-tenant isolation.
• Maturing our AWS account structure, guardrails, and infrastructure-as-code practices.
• Hardening our CI/CD security pipeline.
• Building auditing and monitoring as first-class platform concerns.

Our Stack

• Frontend: Vue 3 + Inertia.js + TypeScript
• Backend: Laravel
• ORM: Doctrine (not Eloquent)
• Database: MySQL
• Hosting: AWS (Lambda, Fargate/ECS, RDS, etc.)
• Identity: Microsoft Entra ID for SSO
• Integrations: LTI 1.3 with Canvas, Brightspace, and other LMS platforms
• Observability: Seq, Sentry, CloudTrail, GuardDuty
• Tools: Slack, Linear, GitHub, PHPStorm, Claude Code

What We’re Looking For

We’re hiring at a senior level because we need someone who can be fairly self-sufficient. You don’t need to be an expert in every aspect of the platform, but we expect a senior developer who can pick things up reasonably quickly.

Required

• 5+ years of professional development experience, with substantial backend and platform focus.
• Hands-on experience designing, deploying, and operating cloud infrastructure (AWS strongly preferred). Comfortable reasoning about networking, IAM, account structure, and the trade-offs between serverless and container-based deployments.
• Infrastructure-as-code experience (AWS CDK, CloudFormation, Terraform, or similar) and a desire to use it as the default.
• Security-aware mindset as a matter of habit: AuthN/AuthZ, secrets handling, dependency risk, multi-tenant isolation.
• Strong relational database fundamentals: schema design, query optimization, indexing, and the ability to debug a slow query without guessing.
• Experience deploying and operating monitoring, logging, and alerting in production. You’ve tuned alert thresholds, written dashboards people actually use, and know the difference between observability that helps and observability that just adds noise.
• Demonstrated commitment to automated testing in codebases where tests are taken seriously.
• Competence with frontend development. You should be comfortable making a change in Vue when a feature crosses the stack, even if it’s not your specialty.
• Ability to work autonomously and communicate clearly in a remote environment.
• Based in Canada, with preference for Eastern or Atlantic time zones.

Nice to Have

• Experience with Laravel, Doctrine, or Vue.
• Background in ed-tech or familiarity with higher education workflows.
• Hands-on experience with LTI 1.3, LMS Integrations and SSO Protocols.
• Experience with Python, which we use for our analytics services.

What We Offer

• Remote-first work with optional weekly office time in PEI.
• MacBook Pro.
• PHPStorm and Claude Code licenses.
• Health coverage.
• 3 weeks vacation + Christmas-to-New-Years + sick leave.
• A small, collaborative team where your work has real impact.
• We generally work 9 to 5 Atlantic time, with some wiggle room.
• Bi-weekly “Stemble Learns” sessions where someone teaches the team about something. Sometimes random topics (skateboarding, government cheese tunnels, how to fly a plane), sometimes external researchers or customers sharing how they’ve used Stemble.

How to Apply

Send your resume and cover letter to ***email_hidden*** or reply to this posting