Our client is looking for a Senior Software Engineer to take significant ownership of technical delivery in a small, highly autonomous engineering team.

This is not a traditional role where success is measured by how much code you personally write. The team uses AI coding agents extensively to accelerate implementation, so the real value of the engineer is in understanding the system and the business, defining what needs to be built, identifying risks, validating the result, and making sound technical decisions.

You will work closely with engineering, product, and customers to turn problems into clear specifications, ship reliable solutions, and continuously improve the systems and processes around development.

What You’ll Do

• Take ownership of features and technical problems from definition through production.

• Translate business and customer needs into clear technical specifications, acceptance criteria, and measurable requirements.

• Define what is in scope, what is out of scope, and what needs to be validated before shipping.

• Use AI coding agents as part of your daily development workflow while independently evaluating and validating their output.

• Design and improve backend services with a focus on reliability, scalability, and maintainability.

• Work with relational databases, including schema design, query performance, migrations, and troubleshooting.

• Build and operate asynchronous and distributed systems using queues, background jobs, retries, exponential backoff, circuit breakers, and idempotency where appropriate.

• Own production services, including deployment, monitoring, troubleshooting, and incident response.

• Incorporate observability, telemetry, and performance considerations into system design.

• Write technical specifications, RFCs, design documents, and implementation plans.

• Identify unnecessary complexity and make pragmatic decisions that allow the team to ship quickly without compromising critical requirements.

• Improve engineering processes, tooling, testing, and guardrails to prevent recurring problems.

• Collaborate directly with product, engineering, and customers in a highly autonomous environment.

What We’re Looking For

• 8+ years of professional software engineering experience, or fewer years with clear evidence of senior-level ownership.

• Strong experience building backend systems or web services.

• Deep experience with at least one dynamic programming language. Python is preferred, but experience with languages such as Ruby, PHP, JavaScript, or TypeScript can also be relevant.

• Strong experience with relational databases, ideally PostgreSQL or MySQL.

• Hands-on experience with asynchronous processing, distributed systems, queues, background jobs, retries, caching, or similar patterns.

• Experience owning production systems and participating in deployment, monitoring, troubleshooting, and incident response.

• Experience designing systems beyond their initial implementation and dealing with real-world scale or operational complexity.

• Ability to write clear, precise technical specifications and design documentation.

• Strong technical judgment and the ability to identify risks, tradeoffs, and unnecessary complexity.

• High autonomy and the ability to make technical decisions without requiring a highly structured backlog or constant direction.

• Practical, hands-on experience using AI coding assistants or coding agents in your development workflow, with an understanding of their strengths and failure modes.

• Strong product sense and the ability to understand the underlying customer or business problem, not just the technical task.

Nice to Have

• Experience with usage-based billing, metering, credits, or similar systems.

• Experience integrating third-party data or scraping APIs, including considerations around cost and reliability.

• TypeScript and React experience, particularly for internal tools or admin interfaces.

• Experience working in a small startup or highly autonomous engineering environment.

• Experience improving engineering processes, development tooling, testing infrastructure, or automated guardrails.

Technology Stack

Backend: Python, FastAPI, Pydantic, SQLAlchemy, Alembic, Taskiq
Frontend: TypeScript, React
Data: PostgreSQL, Redis
Infrastructure: AWS ECS/Fargate, AWS CDK
Observability: Honeycomb, Sentry
AI Development: Claude Code, OpenAI Codex, Cursor, and internal AI tools

You do not need experience with every technology listed above. Strong engineering fundamentals, production ownership, technical judgment, and the ability to learn new technologies are more important than matching the entire stack.

How We Work

Our client is a small team where engineers are expected to operate with a high degree of ownership.

The development process is built around a simple loop:

Understand the problem → Write a precise specification → Implement with AI-assisted development → Verify → Ship → Observe → Learn and improve.

The goal is not simply to produce more code. It is to ship useful, reliable software quickly and build better systems and processes over time.