Senior Software Engineer, Full-Stack — Content Tools

About Us

Epic Kids is the leading digital reading platform built for kids 12 and under, trusted by millions of children, educators, and families around the world. Our mission is to inspire a lifelong love of reading by providing unlimited access to thousands of high-quality books, videos, and educational content through a safe and engaging experience. We combine technology, storytelling, and learning innovation to help every child become a confident reader.

At Epic, you’ll join a collaborative and fast-paced global team passionate about building meaningful products that make a real impact on children’s education and literacy.

Position Summary

The Senior Software Engineer, Full-Stack — Content Tools owns the internal tools and pipelines that bring Epic's library of books, audio, and learning content from raw assets through to production-ready, app-consumable formats. You will design, build, and operate the Angular-based content workbench and the PHP/Go services behind it—turning long, manual content-prep workflows into automated, high-throughput pipelines, and partnering with our content, editorial, and platform teams to make the tools more capable and the operators more productive.

You are an experienced engineer who works independently on complex problems, makes sound technical decisions, and pulls in the right people when a decision touches another team. Our back-end is multi-language: PHP/Symfony powers our long-standing application code, and we are actively investing in Go for newer services—senior engineers help drive that evolution thoughtfully rather than reflexively rewriting what works.

This role works in close partnership with Epic's global engineering team across the US, China, Spain, and India.

Key Responsibilities

• Ship features end-to-end across the content workbench, from the Angular front-end through the PHP/Symfony and Go back-end services against MySQL, owning each from spec to production.
• Build and maintain the ingestion and conversion pipelines that turn the content formats Epic relies on (ePUB, PDF, XML, ONIX) into application-ready output.
• Build and operate the operator review and correction surfaces for pre-aligned audio and text assets, where operators verify, edit, and export synchronized multi-format content.
• Optimize the PHP 8.x API and supporting services to handle high-volume file transfers and background processing of large media assets.
• Lead development of the interactive Angular UI, including coordinate-based interactions over media (such as word boxes over book pages) and reactive state management with RxJS and NgRx.
• Design and document the architecture, data-modeling, and API-design decisions, and align the affected teams before significant choices land in code.
• Use AI-assisted development tools where they speed delivery, and hold generated code to the same review bar as anything else.
• Run production support for the content tooling, lead investigations, and follow through on the systemic fixes from post-mortems.

Required Qualifications

• 5+ years of professional software engineering experience, including significant time shipping production full-stack features end-to-end.
• Strong Angular experience (v14+), including component architecture, RxJS reactive patterns, and a state-management library such as NgRx, backed by strong TypeScript and modern front-end fundamentals (HTML, CSS/SCSS, performance).
• Strong PHP experience on a modern framework (Symfony preferred, Laravel acceptable), including an ORM such as Doctrine.
• Ability to design schemas, write performant queries, and reason about indexing in a relational database such as MySQL.
• Solid engineering fundamentals: you write tests across unit, integration, and end-to-end levels by default, and you work in Git with pull-request-based reviews and CI/CD.
• Fluent written and verbal English: you can write a design doc, run a review, and explain trade-offs to non-engineering partners on a globally distributed team.

Preferred Skills

• Experience with Go for back-end services.
• Experience building or operating media or document processing pipelines (PDF, ePUB, or XML parsing and transformation, or image or audio asset processing) that handle large file payloads at scale.
• Familiarity with digital publishing standards and the internal structure of publishing-industry file formats such as ePUB and ONIX.
• Experience with media-processing tooling such as FFmpeg or ImageMagick for transcoding, resizing, and format conversion.
• Experience with canvas-based UI for drawing, cropping, or annotating over media, using libraries such as cropperjs or wavesurfer.js.
• Experience leading the migration of a production service from one language or runtime to another, such as PHP to Go.
• Experience with Docker and Kubernetes (GKE) at the application-developer level: building images, debugging running pods, and reading logs and metrics.
• Experience on a cloud platform, GCP preferred (GCS, Cloud SQL, Pub/Sub, Cloud Run, or GKE), with AWS or Azure acceptable.
• Experience with consumer-scale concerns such as caching strategies, CDN behavior, and mobile-web performance.