Senior Software Engineer, Advancement Services

About the role

Everything GiveCampus is building runs on school data, and today, getting that data connected is the top reason a school's launch stalls. GC Intelligence, our AI that predicts which donors are likely to give and drafts outreach to them, needs a school's full donor history to work. So do Smart Ask Amounts, which suggest how much to ask each donor for, and GC Gift Officer, the tool fundraisers use to manage their donor relationships.

All of it depends on data flowing between GiveCampus and the school's CRM, where its advancement office (the fundraising and alumni relations team) keeps every donor, gift, and interaction. Only a fraction of our Partner schools send us their complete data. Closing that gap is one of the biggest growth levers in front of the company.

The Advancement Services team owns that flow. It's named for the advancement services staff at each school, the people who manage donor data and the main users of what we build. We connect GiveCampus to the CRMs schools run, mainly Blackbaud Raiser's Edge NXT and Salesforce-based systems such as Ascend and Affinaquest. We also own the API that schools and software partners use to send and pull data, the guided data importer that lets schools upload files of donor and gift records, and a new queue-driven pipeline on AWS designed to move tens of millions of records.

We're hiring two Senior Software Engineers to build that pipeline and the bidirectional integrations that run on it. A redelivered message can become a duplicate gift in a school's books, and the CRM on the other end may cap you at about 10 requests per second. You'll design for both. You'll also help set how the team builds with AI agents, from the checks and context files that keep agents on track to the guardrails that keep them away from donor data they shouldn't touch.

The team is small and the surface area is large, so you'll own big pieces of it from your first month. The code you ship decides whether a gift made on a giving day (a school's one-day fundraising push) lands in a school's CRM correctly that same day.

You'll work closely with the Advancement Services Product Manager, Partner Success, Partner Operations, and Data Science, plus the CRM vendors and connector partners whose APIs we build against. The team runs one-week sprints and ships to production multiple times a day.

We're hiring at two levels. At IC4, you'll own major components of the pipeline and integrations, with design input from the team. At IC5, you'll own the architecture of a system end to end, guide the team's agentic engineering practices, and mentor others through the work. If you're not sure which fits, apply and we'll figure it out together.

Successful outcomes

• A pipeline that holds up at scale. You design and ship AWS-based pipelines with idempotent consumers. You keep memory and database load bounded, throttling writes, budgeting connections, and keeping pipeline storage off the app database.
• Incremental syncs that stay correct. Runs pick up only what changed, using row hashing that holds up when batches run in parallel. You reconcile records that arrive from file uploads, the API, Raiser's Edge NXT, and the GiveCampus app, including deletes, and you handle rate limiting so no single job burns through a CRM's request budget.
• Migrations with a fallback. You move schools onto new infrastructure by proving parity with the old system first, then cutting over with the old path ready. Everything ships as infrastructure as code, with deploy, recovery, replay, and monitoring included from the start.
• No silent failures. Every sync reports to Sentry and New Relic, so the team sees a broken sync before a school's advancement services director does.
• A partner API developers want to build on. You design versioned, documented endpoints that go through a beta period before general availability, so the consultants and software partners who build integrations for schools can plan around them.
• An agentic practice the whole team uses. You write and maintain the context agents read and build reviewed skills for repeated work like stacked PRs and support-ticket triage. You measure whether a tooling change helped and you teach what works to the rest of the team.

What we're looking for

Required

• Pipelines at real volume. 6+ years building and running production backend systems, including a distributed ETL or sync pipeline that moved tens of millions of records. You can explain how your consumers handled redelivery, backpressure, and replay.
• Third-party integration scar tissue. You've built against APIs you didn't control and handled auth, token expiry in the middle of long pagination, rate limits, retries, and upsert semantics. You know what breaks when the other system changes without warning.
• Careful data modeling. You think in external IDs, timezone-safe bulk writes, and safe schema changes to busy core tables. Data integrity matters to you because someone on the other end reconciles every record.
• Clear, written communication. You write design docs and PR descriptions that a distributed team can act on without a meeting, and you're comfortable explaining a sync failure to a school's IT staff.

Strongly preferred

• AI-native, with receipts. You've made coding agents more reliable for a team by writing context files, building skills, or adding checks and evals. You can tell us about a time you didn't trust an agent's output and the check you added afterward.
• Infrastructure you can operate. You ship on AWS (or an equivalent cloud) with infrastructure as code, and you've owned the deploy, monitoring, and on-call side of what you built.

Bonus points

• Experience integrating with fundraising or nonprofit CRMs: Blackbaud Raiser's Edge NXT or its SKY API, Salesforce (including Ascend or Affinaquest), or school systems like Ellucian, Veracross, or Slate.
• Experience with Ruby on Rails and RSpec.
• You've built a public or partner-facing API product with OpenAPI documentation.
• You've worked in higher education advancement, nonprofit fundraising, or a nearby domain.

What you'll learn here

You don't need to know advancement data on day one. In your first 90 days, you'll learn Raiser's Edge NXT, the Blackbaud SKY API, and the Salesforce products we support. You'll also learn the building blocks of school fundraising data:

• Constituents: anyone a school tracks, such as alumni, parents, and donors.
• Hard and soft credits: who gave a gift, and who else gets recognized for it, like a spouse or a company that matched it.
• Recurring gifts and designations: gifts that repeat on a schedule, and the fund each gift goes to, such as financial aid or athletics.
• Opportunities and assignments: large gifts a fundraiser is working toward, and which fundraiser owns each donor relationship.
• Events: reunions, galas, and other gatherings, along with who registered and attended.

You'll get to know our pipeline codebase and our tools (Metabase for reporting, New Relic, and the Rails console). If you come from another backend framework, you'll pick up Rails along the way.

Our stack

• Ruby on Rails and React
• Postgres and Redis
• AWS, including SQS, Aurora, S3, and EKS
• REST APIs documented with OpenAPI, plus the Blackbaud SKY API, Salesforce, and other CRM APIs
• Sentry and New Relic for observability
• AI coding agents across the workflow, with shared context files, skills, and evals

How the team works

• You go deep on the other system's quirks. You'd rather read the SKY API changelog than guess at why a sync broke, and you want to know how a system got the way it is.
• You use AI agents by default and verify what they produce. You've built the checks that catch when they're wrong.
• You write it down. Design docs, PR descriptions, and incident notes that let a distributed team act without a meeting.
• Strong opinions, loosely held. You argue hard for your approach, then commit fully once the team decides.
• You care about the people on the other end: the advancement services staff reconciling every record, the fundraisers relying on the data, and the donors behind it all.

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