About the role
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
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Design and build AI-powered products and features that deliver meaningful user impact
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Build and maintain scalable backend services and user-facing applications
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Collaborate closely with product and design team, and other engineering teams to deliver high-impact features
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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
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6+ years of professional software engineering experience
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Strong foundation in programming and software design principles
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Proven experience building well-scoped, performant modern web applications
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Production experience with React or Next.js and at least one of the following languages: Go, Python, or JavaScript
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Comfort navigating the full stack and pulling in what's needed to ship
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Strong ownership mindset and ability to work effectively within cross-functional teams
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Experience working with AI tools, prompt engineering, or integrating AI into development workflows
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Search infrastructure experience (Elasticsearch or similar)
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Familiarity with message brokers (e.g., Kafka, RabbitMQ, AWS SQS)
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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
Nice to Have
What Success Looks Like
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Consistently delivers product features with high quality and strong attention to detail
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Uses AI-assisted development fluently, producing clean and maintainable code at higher velocity
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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