Full Stack Engineer

ABOUT US
We’re an early-stage education technology company building a guided platform that helps high
school students find direction, build a strong profile, and make informed college and career
decisions.
We’re hiring a hands-on Tech Lead to take technical ownership as we transition from an MVP
development partner to a production-ready, scalable platform. This remote role reports to one of
our two co-founders.
As the MVP launches, you’ll lead the handover from our development partner, support early users,
and develop a deep understanding of the product and codebase. You’ll then work with the reporting
founder to shape the beta roadmap, incorporating broader use, user feedback, and lessons from
launch.
Beyond beta, we see opportunities to expand the product, explore mobile-native experiences, and
pursue new directions. We’re looking for a collaborator who can help turn MVP learning into a
thoughtful technical roadmap and build what comes next.
Given our small team, this role carries meaningful technical decision-making responsibility and will
evolve with the company.
Transition, Learning & MVP Support
● Own the handover from the MVP shop, capturing essential back-end, authentication, and
infrastructure knowledge during the overlap.
● Coordinate post-handoff support and turn key knowledge into documentation shared with the
reporting founder.
● Support early users alongside the MVP shop through launch, ahead of broader beta use.
● Build a strong understanding of the codebase, product, and architecture before taking
independent technical ownership.
Platform Hardening
● Assess the MVP against production requirements and close remaining gaps in error handling,
monitoring, alerts, rate limiting, backup and recovery, and load performance.
● Resolve common MVP-to-production issues, including backend-only credential handling and
scalable data-delivery patterns.
● Ensure data practices meet privacy requirements for student and family information as the
platform moves to live users.
Architecture & Scale
● Lead architecture decisions as the product moves from MVP to production scale, proposing
solutions proactively while the reporting founder retains final sign-off until a CTO is in place.
● Build clean API boundaries that support the planned direction, including a possible move to
mobile-native.
● Ensure data systems scale with usage, extending or replacing MVP patterns as needed.
● Establish and strengthen automated testing and CI/CD practices for production traffic.
Beta Roadmap & Readiness
● Partner with the reporting founder to define the beta scope, timeline, and readiness criteria for
broader use.
● Implement error tracking and product analytics so beta feedback is measurable.
● Establish a rapid bug-triage and iteration cadence for beta users.
● Own incident response and uptime as the product serves live users.
Feature Development
● Build and ship full-stack features across the front end and back end, with hands-on coding every
day.
● Implement UI consistently within the design system provided by our contracted UI/UX designer,
and preserve that consistency as the product grows.
● Maintain content and scoring systems, keeping their documentation, code, data, and validation
tools aligned as they evolve.
AI Capabilities
● Maintain and extend existing AI features, including assessments, recommendations, and
generated guidance.
● Propose and build new AI capabilities with the reporting founder, helping shape direction
beyond a fixed backlog.
● Manage AI reliability and usage costs as the product scales.
Working With the Founding Team
● Act as the day-to-day technical decision-maker, escalating only decisions that need founder
input.
● Partner with the founding team to shape the post-beta roadmap, including mobile, audience
expansion, and new features.
● Communicate technical trade-offs clearly and stay aligned with the founders on product
direction.
● Maintain concise documentation of architecture decisions and system status for effective remote
collaboration.
WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR
● 7–10 years of full-stack experience (React/front-end and Node/Express back-end, or equivalent)
● Experience building new products and/or working at a startup; comfortable with ambiguity,
evolving scope, and moving quickly without the processes of a large organization
● Practical LLM/AI product experience; prompt-based systems required, with conversational AI
and/or personalization and recommendation experience a strong plus
● Strong security and production-hardening instincts, including authentication, rate limiting,
monitoring, and data-pipeline reliability
● Demonstrated ability to make and defend technical decisions independently
● Comfortable serving as the sole engineering hire with broad autonomy while no CTO is in place,
and able to adapt as the team and leadership structure grow

Work arrangement
No