Lead Developer

Remote Full-Time (US hours - Central Time)
Salary Competitive
Employment type Contractor

About our client

Our client is a fast-growing consumer brand making whole-fruit gummy vitamins. Were a small high-performing team that punches above our weight and a big part of that is the technology we build internally.

Weve developed an AI-powered operating platform that acts as the companys operational brain helping our team move faster stay on-brand and make better decisions.

This is not experimental. The platform is live in daily use and continuously evolving. We are not exploring AI as a concept we are building and scaling it as core infrastructure.

Why This Role Matters

Our platform works. Now we need someone who can take it from working to scalable reliable and continuously improving.

This is our first dedicated engineering hire. You wont be joining a large team you will be the technical owner of the system. Youll ship features improve reliability and directly shape what gets built next.

The founder defines the vision and priorities. Your role is to execute turning that vision into high-quality production-ready software.

This role reports directly to the founder.

How We Build

We build using AI-assisted development tools primarily Claude Code.

You will not be writing everything from scratch. You will:

• Use AI tools to accelerate development
• Structure and prompt effectively
• Critically review test and validate outputs
• Ship reliable production-ready systems

Success in this role depends heavily on your ability to use AI coding tools as a core part of your workflow not as a side experiment.

What Youll Own

• The full platform: backend APIs frontend app data pipelines AI integrations infrastructure and deployments
• Production reliability: monitoring performance incident response and cost management
• Data pipelines: ingestion transformation (SQL) and analytics layer
• Feature development using AI-assisted workflows
• Security and access control: permissions secrets logging and data protection

What Youll Work On (Near-Term)

• Hardening data warehouse pipelines for production
• Building new features using AI-assisted development
• Extending planning and goal-tracking tools
• Integrating additional data sources
• Improving observability error handling and system stability
• Keeping the frontend fast intuitive and usable for non-technical users

Key Responsibilities

• Ship production-ready code across the stack (Python TypeScript/React SQL infrastructure)
• Use AI-assisted tools (Claude Code Cursor Copilot etc.) as your primary development workflow
• Review and validate AI-generated code before production
• Design and maintain APIs background jobs and pipelines
• Manage cloud infrastructure deployments monitoring and cost
• Maintain and evolve the data warehouse and analytics layer
• Write tests manage CI/CD and ensure system stability
• Partner directly with the founder to translate business needs into software
• Document systems decisions and runbooks to maintain clarity and continuity

Required Qualifications

• Degree in Computer Science Software Engineering or a related field
• Strong programming fundamentals able to read debug and evaluate code across languages
• Proficiency in Python and JavaScript/TypeScript (or strong in one with ability to ramp quickly)
• Solid SQL skills querying schema design and working with data
• Experience building or maintaining production web applications

AI Development (Critical Requirement):

• Daily hands-on experience with AI coding tools (Claude Code Cursor Copilot Codex etc.)
• Ability to effectively prompt structure tasks and validate outputs
• Strong judgment in identifying and correcting AI-generated errors
• Proven use of AI tools on real non-trivial projects

AI Systems Understanding:

• Practical understanding of LLMs prompting context windows failure modes and retrieval
• Ability to reason about how AI tools behave and why

Engineering Judgment:

• Strong understanding of production systems (testing monitoring reliability performance)
• Ability to distinguish between works locally and production-ready

Other:

• Self-directed and resourceful
• Clear communicator (able to work with non-technical stakeholders)
• Strong written and spoken English

Nice to Have

• Experience with React/ FastAPI PostgreSQL Docker CI/CD
• Experience with data pipelines ETL tools or data warehouses (e.g. dbt)
• Exposure to LLM APIs (OpenAI Anthropic etc.)
• Startup or small-team experience
• Familiarity with cloud platforms (AWS Vercel Railway Heroku etc.)

First 90 Days

Days 130: Learn the System

• Understand platform architecture (backend frontend data AI infrastructure)
• Set up locally and deploy your first change
• Get comfortable with AI-assisted workflows in the codebase
• Learn how the team uses the platform day-to-day

Days 3160: Start Shipping

• Deliver meaningful features or fixes from the roadmap
• Improve at least one area of reliability (monitoring performance stability)
• Establish communication and execution rhythm

Days 6190: Take Ownership

• Independently take work from idea to production
• Propose and implement improvements
• Demonstrate speed and quality using AI-assisted development

Who This Role Is a Great Fit For

• A high-agency developer who thrives with ownership and autonomy
• Someone excited about AI-assisted development as a core workflow
• A builder who values reliable production systems over demos
• A pragmatic engineer focused on shipping and iteration
• Someone comfortable being the sole developer with direct founder collaboration

Who This Role Is NOT a Fit For

• Someone who needs heavy structure large teams or detailed specs
• Strict frontend-only or backend-only specialists
• Engineers unwilling to adopt AI-assisted development workflows
• Those who prefer slow predictable environments
• Candidates focused on theoretical AI research over shipping products

Why This Role

• Real impact: Build and scale a system used daily to run a real business
• True ownership: No layers you ship and see results directly
• AI-native environment: Work at the forefront of AI-assisted software development
• Accelerated growth: Full-stack exposure across AI data backend frontend and infra
• Remote & autonomous: Output-driven flexible work environment

Required Experience:

IC