Junior Software Engineer, Full-Stack

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 Junior Software Engineer, Full-Stack is an entry-level role designed for recent graduates beginning their professional engineering careers. You will write code across our web stack—front-end in Angular/TypeScript, back-end in PHP and Go—on well-scoped tasks under the close guidance of senior engineers. Our back-end is multi-language: PHP/Symfony powers our long-standing application code, and we are actively investing in Go for newer services—so a willingness to learn both, and to grow with the direction the codebase is moving, matters. The first year is about learning: our codebase, our review and release process, how features move from idea to production, and the fundamentals of writing software that other engineers can trust. You will pair with senior teammates, take part in code reviews as both author and reviewer, and grow into larger pieces of work as your skills develop.

This is a fully remote, US-based role working closely with a global, bilingual (English–Chinese) engineering team. New and recent graduates are encouraged to apply.

Key Responsibilities

• Implement well-scoped front-end features and UI changes in Angular (TypeScript, SCSS) under the guidance of senior engineers
• Implement well-scoped back-end endpoints and changes against MySQL, working in PHP (Symfony + Doctrine ORM) on existing application code and in Go on newer services as the team's Go footprint expands
• Investigate and fix bugs across the stack—reproduce the issue, identify the cause with help when needed, and ship the fix
• Write unit tests for the code you ship and keep tests passing on the areas you touch
• Participate in code reviews as both author and reviewer
• Work with designers, product managers, and senior engineers to translate small user-facing requirements into shipped changes
• Maintain documentation—READMEs, code comments, and onboarding notes—for the areas you work in
• Use AI-assisted development tools to support learning and productivity, ensuring you understand and can defend every line of code you commit
• Take on progressively larger and more independent scopes of work as you ramp on the codebase, supported by pairing and code walkthroughs with senior engineers

Required Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree (recently completed or completing within the next 6 months) in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a closely related field—or equivalent practical preparation (e.g., bootcamp + substantial portfolio)
• Solid grasp of programming fundamentals: data structures, control flow, basic algorithms, object-oriented programming
• Hands-on coding experience in at least one modern programming language through coursework, personal projects, internships, or open-source contributions
• Familiarity with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript (or TypeScript) at a level sufficient to build simple interactive web pages
• Familiarity with Git and pull-request-based workflows
• Basic familiarity with relational databases and SQL (SELECT, JOIN, simple WHERE clauses)
• Eagerness to learn, openness to feedback, and willingness to ask questions rather than guess
• Strong written and verbal communication skills in English for daily collaboration and technical documentation

Preferred Skills

Any of the following are nice to have but not required—we expect to teach our specific stack on the job:

• Coursework, internship, or side-project exposure to a modern component-based front-end framework (Angular, React, or Vue) and reactive patterns (RxJS, hooks, or similar)
• Coursework, internship, or side-project exposure to a server-side language (PHP or Go especially welcomed; Java, Python, or Node.js also fine) — bonus if used with a framework such as Symfony, Spring, Laravel, Express, or Django, or with Go's standard library and common patterns (HTTP handlers, goroutines, modules)
• Exposure to an ORM (Doctrine, Hibernate, Eloquent, Prisma, TypeORM, or similar)
• Exposure to unit-testing frameworks (Jasmine/Karma, Jest, PHPUnit, Go's testing package, JUnit, pytest, etc.)
• Exposure to Docker or containerized local development
• Exposure to any cloud platform (GCP preferred; AWS or Azure also welcomed) — e.g., deploying a personal project, working through a free-tier tutorial
• Internship experience at a software company
• Open-source contributions, hackathon projects, capstone work, or other evidence of engineering curiosity outside of coursework
• Working proficiency in Mandarin Chinese to collaborate with global engineering and business partners
• Interest in ed-tech, children's media, or content-platform work

Compensation: 120-150k - inclusive of bonus - flexible for the right skillset