Principal Software Engineer

Description Overview: As the principal engineer, you will define and drive Nerdy’s technical vision and architecture across multiple teams, architect complex systems at scale, and elevate engineering quality—while advancing AI-powered capabilities that improve how learners and tutors connect and succeed.

About Nerdy At Nerdy (NYSE: NRDY) - the company behind Varsity Tutors - we’re redrawing the blueprint of learning. Our Live + AI™ platform fuses real-time human expertise with proprietary generative-AI systems, setting a new bar for measurable academic impact at global scale.

We recruit the kind of technologists and operators you’d bet on as solo founders - people who turn ambiguous problems into shipping code, iterate faster than markets move, and compound their advantage with every data point. In an era where great employees can deliver 10-times the leverage of the merely good, we back those who play to win.

Fortune favors the bold. Join us.

How We Compete

• AI-Native at every level From the CEO to day-one hires, everyone builds and ships with generative AI. If you’re not wielding AI, you’re not done.
• Entrepreneurial velocity Move at founder speed, prototype in hours, and measure in real user outcomes. Slow teams die.
• Free-market rigor Ideas rise or fall on merit and results - no committees, no politics, no cap on upside.
• Full-stack ownership You design, build, and run what you ship; accountability is a feature, not a bug.
• Reward for contribution Pay rises with impact, not years. Outstanding results earn outsized rewards. We evaluate both what you achieve and how you achieve it: living our leadership principles and using AI effectively are formally measured and rewarded.
• Relentless exploration Push the frontier of generative AI in live learning and - because only the paranoid survive - questioning every legacy assumption along the way.
• Is Apolitical You stay focused on mission-aligned outcomes, not distractions or unrelated causes.

If you’re a technically minded builder who thrives on open competition, personal responsibility, and the chance to redefine how the world learns - while continually stretching the limits of what generative AI can do - come do the most ambitious and rewarding work of your career here. Learn more at nerdy.com.

Nerdy’s shareholder letters below explain our latest products and strategy:

• Q2-2026 Shareholder Letter
• Q1-2026 Shareholder Letter
• Q4-2025 Shareholder Letter

Qualifications

• 10+ years of software engineering with deep hands-on experience building and operating large-scale distributed systems; 3+ years leading technical direction across multiple teams.
• Expertise in service-oriented and event-driven architectures; microservices for UX and APIs in cloud environments (AWS preferred).
• Strong data systems background: streaming (e.g., Kinesis/Kafka), big-data processing (e.g., Spark/Hive), and storage (DynamoDB/Redis/RDBMS).
• Proficiency in CI/CD and infrastructure as code (e.g., CodeDeploy/CodeBuild, Terraform/CloudFormation); solid Linux and command-line skills.
• AI/ML experience shipping to production: designing RAG pipelines, model serving, recommendations/ranking, evaluation (offline/online), monitoring, and drift/quality management.
• Responsible AI practices: privacy, security, safety, bias mitigation, and auditability; experience integrating AI guardrails into apps and platforms.
• AI-native developer productivity: skilled with tools that accelerate teams (e.g., Cursor, Claude Code, ChatGPT, Make.com, n8n, Supabase, Netlify, Vercel, Grok, Bolt) and with prompt/tool orchestration and evaluation.
• Strong coding fundamentals (OO design, algorithms, data structures) in one or more languages (e.g., Python, Java, Go, TypeScript).
• Clear communicator with executive presence; able to translate complex technical trade-offs for technical and non-technical audiences.
• Familiarity with AWS services (e.g., EC2, RDS, Kinesis, DynamoDB) and deploying large-scale web applications.
• Aptitude to quickly learn new languages/technologies; growth mindset and high ownership.
• Understand and appreciate that Nerdy is an apolitical company, united in the focus on helping people learn.

Responsibilities

• Set the org-wide architectural strategy and guardrails; create reference designs and patterns that align teams on a coherent technical direction.
• Architect and deliver cross-cutting, highly scalable systems (e….