Staff Software Engineer, Color Cloud

The Staff Software Engineer on the Color Cloud team is a unique and vital role within Madison Reed, owning the technology that runs our Hair Color Bars. This role involves architecting and leading the development of the systems that power the in-store experience, driving the technical strategy for Hair Color Bar operations, and contributing to the organization’s long-term architectural vision. Working in a cross-functional, agile, ai-first environment, the engineer collaborates with teammates, product owners, designers, store operations, and stakeholders to ship reliable, fast, premium tools for the people serving our guests face-to-face. You mentor, inspire and lead  engineers at all levels and foster a culture of innovation, collaboration, and excellence.

We expect our Staff Software Engineer to build AI-powered experiences into the colorist and store toolset, color formulation, consultation, and operational copilots, and to have fundamentally changed how they build by working alongside frontier agentic coding tools, while retaining the deep technical ownership required to audit, verify, and own everything that ships.

The base range for this contract position is between 170,000 and 175,000. At Madison Reed, we aim to pay competitively. Factors which may affect starting pay within this range may include geography/market, skills, education, experience, and other qualifications of the successful candidate. This role must be based in the United States.

What You'll Do

• Own the Color Cloud platform end-to-end. Architect, build, and ship the Color Cloud platform making foundational technical decisions that shape how stylists check guests in, build color formulas, run consultations, and transact.
• Drive technical strategy for in-store systems. Identify opportunities for innovation and lead the adoption of new technologies, tools, and patterns across the Color Cloud surface area.
• Build AI-powered experiences for colorists. Put AI directly into the hands of the people serving our guests, surfacing personalized formula and service recommendations, powering consultation and conversational tooling, and integrating LLM-backed features into the colorist workflow.
• Engineer for the realities of a physical store. Treat reliability, offline resilience, payments, and hardware integrations (card readers, receipt printers, tablets) as first-class concerns. When a Color Bar is open, these systems cannot be down, design for that bar.
• Champion UX and performance for working professionals. Obsess over the details that make a tool  fast and trustworthy in the hands of a colorist mid-appointment: latency, responsiveness, error recovery, and the accessibility standards required to support a diverse workforce.
• Own reliability in the wild. Treat CI/CD, monitoring, analytics, and release management as a fundamental part of the job, not an afterthought. Set a high bar through observability, error tracking, and optimization across a fleet of in-store devices.
• Take ownership of large, ambiguous initiatives and break them into actionable workstreams. Lead efforts to refactor and optimize large areas of the codebase, ensuring alignment with business goals and long-term scalability.
• Mentor and raise the bar. Establish patterns for code reuse, elevate the engineers around you through rigorous code review and testing practices, and foster a culture of technical excellence and knowledge sharing.
• Collaborate with product, operations, and leadership to align technical solutions with business priorities, shaping both what gets built and how it gets built.

What We're Looking For

• 8+ years of professional software engineering experience, with deep expertise building production systems in JavaScript/TypeScript (Node.js, React).
• A proven track record of building, shipping, and maintaining complex, data-heavy applications in production at scale.
• Mission-critical systems experience. You’ve built software where downtime has immediate, visible business cost, and you design for reliability, graceful degradation, and recovery accordingly.
• Mastery of state and performance. You understand the render cycle, know how to keep interfaces responsive under load, and can orchestrate complex asynchronous data flows. Strong command of TypeScript and API design.
• Full lifecycle ownership. You build things that run reliably in production, not just pass review, owning the CI/CD pipeline, error rates, and your software’s behavior in the real world.
• Your workflow has been altered by AI. You are already using frontier agentic coding tools (e.g. Claude Code, Codex) to build faster, and can describe specific ways they have structurally changed how you work, while retaining the skepticism to audit, verify, and fully own their output.
• Demonstrated technical leadership. A track record of setting technical direction, designing scalable and maintainable architecture, and measurably leveling up the engineers around you.
• A high-ownership mindset with a bias toward action, comfort operating in ambiguity, and strong product intuition.
• Experience building or operating the AI/LLM infrastructure that other engineering teams build on (agent frameworks, eval pipelines, retrieval/RAG, prompt and tool-call tooling).
• Exceptional communication and collaboration skills, with low ego and high standards.

Bonus Points

• • Experience building point-of-sale, payments, or retail/store-operations systems.
  • Experience with offline-first architectures, device fleets, or hardware/peripheral integrations.
  • Background in appointment/booking systems, scheduling, or workforce-facing tooling.
  • Open-source contributions, or products you’ve built and shipped to the world yourself.

Big on Benefits 

The Perks? Glad you asked…

• Comprehensive Healthcare
• 100% Company Paid Short and Long Term Disability 
• 401k Participation and Equity Grants
• Continuing Education Contributions
• HSA Employer Contributions and FSA Options
• Parental Leave Program
• Commuter Benefits
• Responsible Paid Time Off Program
• Complimentary Madison Reed Products + Discounts on Hair Color Bar Services
• Company sponsored events
• But wait, there’s more…

We are Madison Reed.

We’re disrupting a $50 billion industry.

Since 2013, we’ve offered our clients the option to truly own their beauty with a revolutionary choice—your place or ours? Home or Hair Color Bar? Our professional hair color is truly omnichannel, with the option to order or subscribe through our website, pick up in-store at our Hair Color Bars, or make an appointment at one of our Hair Color Bar locations (over 20 & growing). At our Hair Color Bars, clients can choose from a variety of color services from licensed cosmetologists—permanent hair color, roots only, hair gloss, highlights and more. With our men’s line launched in 2020, we’re shaking up the $50 billion hair care industry with products that continue to raise the bar for doing hair at home.

We live our values.

Here at our San Francisco headquarters and in every Hair Color Bar, we truly live our values—Love, Joy, Courage, Responsibility, and Trust. Our values inform everything we do, from how we treat our clients to how we treat every member of our fast-growing team. Our founder & CEO, Amy Errett, has fostered a one-of-a-kind culture based on transparency, accountability, and fun; where diversity and inclusion are of utmost importance and every team member feels supported to succeed.

We are hair color that breaks the rules.

Our commitment to the ultimate client experience, paired with our dedication to product innovation and the latest beauty technology, has attracted a devoted, consistently-growing base of fans, converts, and color evangelists. We love what we do—and it shows.

Join us in our mission to live life colorfully and make personal care more personal.

Information for Recruiters: Madison Reed only accepts resumes directly from candidates. Madison Reed does not accept unsolicited resumes from staffing vendors, including recruitment agencies and/or search firms, and does not pay fees to any such vendors for any unsolicited resumes.

Madison Reed. is an equal opportunity employer. We are committed to recruiting, training, compensating and promoting our employees regardless of race, color, religion, sex, disability, national origin, age, sexual orientation, gender or any other protected classes as required by applicable law that might make us unique or different. As a company, we are dedicated to reflecting the diversity, multiculturalism, and inclusion found in the communities we serve. Inclusion is at the heart of what we do, from the way we craft our job descriptions, to the values we espouse daily.