Enabling Online Education with AP Classroom

Role: Senior Full-Stack Engineer

Built and maintained features for AP Classroom, the platform millions of AP students and teachers use for course materials, assignments, quizzes, and scores, across 38 AP courses.

About the Project

AP Classroom is CollegeBoard’s software platform for Advanced Placement, the US and Canadian program that lets high schoolers take college-level courses. Finetune Learning built and ran it for CollegeBoard, at a scale where a slow query or a flaky ETL job doesn’t stay quiet: over 3.5 million students and 180,000 teachers depend on it.

What I Worked On

I diagnosed and fixed performance problems in the GraphQL APIs, re-architecting them for different use cases without breaking data integrity, which improved API performance by 40%. I replaced the scheduled ETL jobs, previously built on raw SQL queries that failed often, with a streaming design that cut ETL failures by 90%, and resolved the AWS ECS memory issues that came with it. I also integrated third-party tools (Learnosity, Paperscorer) into the platform, and worked directly with CollegeBoard’s senior product staff on roadmap and sprint planning.

Result

Some of this work shipped during COVID, when remote learning made the platform’s reliability matter more than usual. Faster APIs and a streaming ETL pipeline meant fewer failures reaching students and teachers at a moment when there was no easy fallback.