We are building a workflow and reporting platform that has to be powerful enough for support hundreds of unique approval processes in a school district but easy enough for anyone, from the Chief Business Officer to a school site office manager, to use.

Our users work at all levels of the district in district office departments ranging from finance, payroll, HR, custodial services, transportation, food services and more. They also work at individual school sites as principals, teachers, substitutes, counselors, and even parents. To meet the needs of this wide variety of users, there are thousands of unique forms and processes on our system that span from new hire packets to student injury reports to bus services requests to permission slips. Our backend models need to be flexible enough to support a wide variety of use cases but structured enough to allow for scale and data retrieval across the entire system.

Other technical challenges may relate to:

• Data security and privacy, as our forms may collect sensitive information
• Customized bulk data exports in a variety of formats (csv, pdf, zip)
• Seasonality and spikes of system usage - 1/3 of our total traffic for the year occurs in the rush up to the start of the school year, in August and September

Finally, because our districts rely on us for their critical processes we must ensure our system is reliable and stable. The team understands that working code is not enough and a primary component of an engineer's job is to improve the maintainability of the long-term structure of the system.