Senior Software Engineer

Job description

### **About Us** For 20 years, Ladders has connected ambitious professionals with $100K+ opportunities, now serving over 8 million members. We're a profitable, small, collaborative, venture-backed team in NYC that moves fast, ships real products, and applies AI in ways that genuinely help people land better careers. ### **The Role** We're looking for a thoughtful Senior Full-Stack Engineer(6+ years experience) who thrives owning problems end-to-end. You'll design and build AI-powered features that reach millions of job seekers, make pragmatic architectural decisions, and balance speed with long-term quality. This is not a backlog-ticket role, we want someone who takes a concept all the way to production, not just executes what's handed to them. This is a NY based role with regular in-office presence required (hybrid schedule). ### What You’ll Do - Design and build AI-powered products and features that deliver meaningful user impact - Build and maintain scalable backend services and user-facing applications - Collaborate closely with product and design team, and other engineering teams to deliver high-impact features - Make structural technical decisions and clearly articulate trade-offs when solving complex problems - Take ownership of a product area, service, or technical domain and drive it forward - Continuously improve system performance, reliability, and developer experience ### What We’re Looking For - 6+ years of professional software engineering experience - Strong foundation in programming and software design principles - Proven experience building well-scoped, performant modern web applications - Production experience with React or Next.js and at least one of the following languages: Go, Python, or JavaScript - Comfort navigating the full stack and pulling in what's needed to ship - Strong ownership mindset and ability to work effectively within cross-functional teams ##### **Nice to Have** - Experience working with AI tools, prompt engineering, or integrating AI into development workflows - Search infrastructure experience (Elasticsearch or similar) - Familiarity with message brokers (e.g., Kafka, RabbitMQ, AWS SQS) - Database optimization experience (e.g., MariaDB or similar relational databases) - Experience with modern frontend tooling (e.g., Vite) - Background in Computer Science or equivalent practical experience ### What Success Looks Like - Consistently delivers product features with high quality and strong attention to detail - Uses AI-assisted development fluently, producing clean and maintainable code at higher velocity - Builds strong partnerships with engineers, product and design, contributing to team and organizational growth - Proactively surfaces problems and drives them to resolution - Makes the codebase, the system, and the team around you measurably better over time ### What We Offer - Competitive compensation: base salary $200,000 ~ $220,000 + stock options - Home office setup stipend - Gym membership reimbursement - Commuter benefits program - Comprehensive health coverage: medical, dental, and vision - 401(k) retirement plan - Health Savings Account (HSA), Health Care FSA (HCFSA), and Dependent Care FSA (DCFSA)