Senior Full Stack Developer

Contract-to-Hire • $40/hr Competitive Pay • Full-Time Remote

About the role

We're looking for a Senior Full Stack Developer to an own an application end-to-end and set the technical direction for the team building it. This role is a 6-month contract with the potential for full-time employment at the end of the period.

This is not someone who waits for tickets, but a professional who can take a client's business problem, scope it, design the data model, build the backend, wire up the deployment, and think three steps ahead about what a change breaks downstream.

The stack is Next.js, React, TypeScript, and Postgres. If your recent production work is in a legacy template-driven stack, this is not the right role.

This is not a hands-off management role. You will be in the codebase every day.

What you will do

• Build production client applications end to end: schema, API, business logic, auth, background jobs, UI, deployment.
• Own the architecture. Database design, migrations, caching strategy, rate limiting, third party integrations, service boundaries.
• Plan, execute, and maintain application infrastructure: deployment environments, hosting, CI/CD pipelines, databases, and supporting services, with reliability, scalability, and security as the standard.
• Scope requirements, break work into epics and tickets, estimate effort, and sequence dependencies across the team.
• Run sprint planning and keep work moving. Assign, review, and course correct daily so quality holds under deadline.
• Conduct thorough code reviews and audits. Catch bugs, security vulnerabilities, and performance problems before they reach production.
• Mentor developers with constructive, best practice driven feedback that raises the whole team's output.
• Translate business goals into a technical plan and communicate tradeoffs and timelines clearly to non technical stakeholders.
• Write the conventions the team follows. CLAUDE.md files, reusable Claude skills, project scaffolding, reference implementations.
• Push back when a request will cause problems, and propose the better version.

Core web fundamentals

These do not change with the framework, and we test for them.

• Rock solid HTML5 and CSS3. Semantic markup, responsive layouts with Flexbox and Grid, cross-browser compatibility, and accessibility basics (WCAG / a11y).
• Expert-level JavaScript (ES6+) independent of any framework. Closures, promises, async/await, the event loop, and the DOM APIs.
• Strong grasp of HTTP, REST, cookies and sessions, CORS, authentication and authorization, and browser dev tools.

Modern stack

You do not need to have shipped every one of these, but you should be fluent in most and able to get productive in the rest quickly.

• Core: Next.js 15 (App Router, server components, server actions, modern data fetching and caching patterns), React, TypeScript in strict mode
• React depth: Strong component architecture, hooks, and a clear point of view on state management.
• TypeScript: You design sound types and hold the codebase to strict mode discipline rather than fighting it. No any without a comment explaining why.
• Data: Postgres via Supabase (auth, storage, realtime), Drizzle ORM, Upstash Redis
• Connective tissue: tRPC, Inngest, Resend
• UI: Tailwind CSS, shadcn/ui, a shared branded component package. Production quality responsive UI, not a designer's job dumped on you and not an afterthought.

Engineering practices

• Clean, readable, maintainable code. Sensible naming, small focused functions, DRY and SOLID applied with judgment rather than dogma.
• You write tests and think about edge cases, not just the happy path. Jest, Vitest, and Playwright on the JS side, with coverage that means something rather than coverage for its own sake.
• Security conscious by habit. Input validation, SQL injection and XSS prevention, safe handling of secrets and credentials.
• Performance awareness. You know how to profile, spot bottlenecks, and optimize without prematurely over engineering.
• Solid debugging methodology, plus the discipline to write clear documentation and clear commit messages.

Engineering workflow and infrastructure

• Git based workflows: branching, pull requests, code review, resolving conflicts cleanly.
• CI/CD and deployment. Vercel is our primary target. Experience with Docker, AWS, or GCP is welcome.
• Caching and background processing (Redis, queue workers), API design, and production monitoring and logging.
• Branch protection on main and production. Every change goes through review.

Working with AI

We are a Claude native development shop. Claude Code and Cursor are a core part of how we work, not a novelty. We expect you to be genuinely good at it. Candidates who use Claude as an autocomplete, and candidates who ship whatever it hands them without reading it, are both the wrong fit.

That means:

• You use AI to move fast on implementation and you review every line it produces.
• You know how to give it the right context. Repo conventions, file structure, the actual constraint you are solving for.
• You write and maintain .md files and custom skills so the whole team gets the same quality of output.
• You know where Claude is unreliable and where you need to think it through yourself.
• You build evals for AI powered features rather than tweaking prompts and hoping.

What we are actually looking for

• High agency. You see the thing that needs doing and you do it. When you hit a blocker, you resolve it or escalate it with a proposed solution. You do not sit idle waiting for clarification on something you could reasonably decide yourself.
• Systems thinking. When a client asks for a new field on a form, you already know which tables change, what the migration looks like, which integrations and reports consume that data, and what breaks if you get it wrong. You think about the whole application, not just the request in front of you.
• Ownership. You treat the applications you build as yours. That means monitoring, error triage, performance, documentation, and the parts nobody assigned to you.
• Independence at speed. You can go from a loose description to working, reviewed, deployed code without a spec written for you.
• Judgment about complexity. You know when to reach for the sophisticated solution and when the boring one is correct. You do not add dependencies casually.

Experience

• 10 or more years shipping production web applications.
• 2 or more years leading or setting technical direction for a team.
• Meaningful backend and infrastructure ownership, not just feature work.
• Relational schemas you designed that survived real growth and real migrations.
• You have been the person responsible when something broke in production.
• Recent production work in React and TypeScript.

Nice to have

• SaaS or multi tenant application experience.
• Incident response and on call maturity.
• Monorepo experience (Turborepo, pnpm).
• Agency or client services background.

You are probably not a fit if

• You need detailed tickets to get moving.
• You have only worked inside one layer of the stack.
• You have never touched a deployment pipeline or a database migration.
• You want a management title and no code.
• You prefer large teams with defined lanes and long review cycles.

Benefits for Fulll-Time Salary Employees

• Vanguard 401(k) with the following match: 100% match of first 3%, 50% match of next 2%
• 17 days PTO plus 13 paid holidays
• Company health insurance plan: the firm pays 50% of the employee's monthly premium; dependents added must be paid 100% by the employee
• Company dental and vision insurance plans (firm offers these plans but pays no premiums)
• Maternity and paternity leave

All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, or national origin.