Interview: The Code Behind the Course

Reading time: ~4 minutes

Behind every course a student opens at IU, there’s a team making sure everything fits together. Josue is one of them. As a Senior Software Developer, he builds the infrastructure that nobody sees but everyone benefits from. Here’s his view from inside IU Group.

Getting to know you

Tell us a bit about yourself! Who are you, and what do you do at IU?

Servus! I’m Josue, Senior Software Developer at EduPlatform and have been part of IU for the last two years. Right now I’m working on CUMO, an internal platform that allows us to create and manage curricula and modules. In other words: what happens behind the scenes before a student ever opens their first course.
Besides that, I live in Munich, which makes it easiest for me to jump to the mountains and enjoy everything related to that. I like hiking in general, skiing in winter, and mountain biking in summer.

The role, in your own words

How would you describe what it’s like to work as a developer at an EdTech company?

Working as a developer at an EdTech company is a mix of solving technical problems and understanding the needs of business stakeholders. It’s rewarding because the products we build directly impact accessibility and reliability for our students. Small technical decisions can have a significant impact.

At CUMO, we integrate data from different internal systems and provide an interface for our curriculum managers, so they can own all the information related to courses, modules, curricula, and programs. To support this, our team also built a chatbot that uses AI to explore our database, understand how modules and courses are arranged in sequence plans, and provide information for colleagues outside of engineering.

Making it tangible

If you had to explain your job to a 5-year-old, how would you put it?

Imagine a huge LEGO box with thousands of pieces. My job is to make sure all the right pieces are in the right place, so that when a student starts building their course, everything fits together perfectly. The tricky part? The pieces come from many different boxes. So a big part of my day is actually talking to people and figuring out which piece belongs where, and sometimes realizing the problem has nothing to do with the LEGO at all. The solution isn’t always where you expect it and that’s actually what keeps the job interesting. 🙂
And lately, I have a pretty smart assistant helping me with the building: an AI tool that reads the instructions, checks the pieces, and gets to work. I just make sure it’s building the right thing.

For anyone older than 5 😄: I work on the platform that manages how courses, modules and curricula are structured across IU. I make sure the data is consistent, systems talk to each other, and our curriculum managers have everything they need in one place.

Zooming out to the team

Speaking of making things simple, what does good team culture mean to you? What helps you do your best work?

For me, good team culture is about giving people the space and trust to explore, challenge ideas, and build things that weren’t necessarily on the roadmap.
Our chatbot is a good example of that. It wasn’t on the roadmap at all. It started as a side project. And now, it has the potential to become just as important for non-technical colleagues who need quick access to insights and data.

I find that really exciting because when developers have the freedom to experiment, innovation doesn’t always have to come from the roadmap. Sometimes the best ideas come from someone simply asking: ‘What if we tried this?’

With AI and tools like Claude Code changing the way we develop software, I think code itself is becoming less of a bottleneck. Developers can spend more time thinking about what we should build, why we should build it, and what is actually possible. Rather than only focusing on how to implement it.

Bringing it back to the present

What’s your current project, and what’s on your team’s roadmap for the rest of the year?

Right now, we’re taking our first steps towards going live with CUMO. After months of building a platform that manages everything related to courses, modules and curricula, it’s finally getting into the hands of the people who will actually use it.

For the rest of the year, I expect our roadmap to become a combination of new features, bug fixes and learning from how people actually use what we’ve built.
And that’s probably the most interesting part for me: the next phase isn’t just about making the platform technically better. It’s about making it genuinely useful in people’s everyday work. That requires just as much communication and collaboration as it does good engineering.