Founding Full-Stack Engineer

Wellfound; New York, Northern (NY, KY); Hybrid; USD 180,000 - 250,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health, dental, and vision for you and

Substantial equity

Unlimited vacation

Equinox membership

Job summary

Primitive Instruments Corporation is seeking an experienced engineer to own features end-to-end across the stack—from database schemas to React components and deployment pipelines. You will design GraphQL schemas, build dashboards, and own platform observability and SLOs while collaborating with hardware and ML teams.

The role emphasizes ownership across Django, Python, and a modern React framework, with production responsibility and cross-domain influence.

Qualifications

• 5+ years building production web apps; deep on at least one side (Python or TypeScript) and credible on the other.
• Shipped Django + a modern React framework (Next.js, Remix) in production, not just side projects.
• Strong on GraphQL schema design — pagination, permissions, N+1, error contracts, codegen.
• Comfortable operating services in Kubernetes; you can read a pod's logs, events, and resource limits before asking for help.

Responsibilities

• Own and evolve features end-to-end across the stack — from database schema and GraphQL resolvers to React components and the deploy pipeline that ships them
• Design schema and mutations in Strawberry GraphQL: pagination, permissions, error contracts, query performance
• Build the dashboard in Next.js (App Router), Turborepo, and our shared packages/ui design system, using TanStack Query with codegen'd hooks
• Operate the platform in production: EKS (Auto Mode), Celery workers, PostgreSQL, GitHub Actions for CI
• Wire observability that actually gets used — Grafana, Loki, Mimir, Alloy — and the SLOs and alerts that go with it
• Lead cross-stack performance work: a slow page is usually three problems in three layers, and you'll find all three
• Mentor new engineers as the team grows; raise the bar on API design, type safety, and code review across both sides of the stack
• Participate in the on-call rotation for the platform

Skills

Python

TypeScript

Django

Next.js

GraphQL

Kubernetes

Codegen

Mentoring

Tools

TanStack Query

Turborepo

pnpm

AWS EKS

Celery

PostgreSQL

Grafana

Loki

Job description

About the role

Primitive's product surface is wide on purpose. The Django/Strawberry GraphQL API, the Next.js dashboard, the Python CLI, the Celery workers, and the EKS clusters that host all of it are one product — not five. We want someone who can move across that whole surface and ship features end-to-end.

This isn't "frontend with a touch of backend." You'll design GraphQL schema, write the resolvers, build the React UI on top, and own the deploy and the dashboards that prove it works. You'll set technical direction for how the platform layer is built, mentor new engineers across the stack as the team grows, and partner with the hardware and ML teams to expose their work cleanly through the product.

If you want one job where the same brain designs the schema, the React component, and the SLO, this is that.

What you'll do

• Own and evolve features end-to-end across the stack — from database schema and GraphQL resolvers to React components and the deploy pipeline that ships them
• Design schema and mutations in Strawberry GraphQL: pagination, permissions, error contracts, query performance
• Build the dashboard in Next.js (App Router), Turborepo, and our shared packages/ui design system, using TanStack Query with codegen'd hooks
• Operate the platform in production: EKS (Auto Mode), Celery workers, PostgreSQL, GitHub Actions for CI
• Wire observability that actually gets used — Grafana, Loki, Mimir, Alloy — and the SLOs and alerts that go with it
• Lead cross-stack performance work: a slow page is usually three problems in three layers, and you'll find all three
• Mentor new engineers as the team grows; raise the bar on API design, type safety, and code review across both sides of the stack
• Participate in the on-call rotation for the platform

About you

• 5+ years building production web apps; deep on at least one side (Python or TypeScript) and credible on the other
• Shipped Django + a modern React framework (Next.js, Remix) in production, not just side projects
• Strong on GraphQL schema design — pagination, permissions, N+1, error contracts, codegen
• Comfortable operating services in Kubernetes; you can read a pod's logs, events, and resource limits before asking for help
• Demonstrated end-to-end ownership: you've taken features from schema design through production operation and iteration
• Care about the seams: API contracts, type safety end-to-end, codegen over hand-written types
• Comfortable setting architectural direction across a small team, balancing vision with pragmatism

Bonus

• Strawberry GraphQL or strawberry-graphql-django experience
• Turborepo / pnpm workspace experience at scale
• EKS, ArgoCD, or similar GitOps tooling in production
• Background working with hardware, embedded systems, or developer tools
• Contributed to open-source frameworks in the Django, GraphQL, or React ecosystems

Stack

Python 3.13, Django, Strawberry GraphQL, Celery, PostgreSQL, TypeScript, Next.js 15, TanStack Query, Turborepo, pnpm, AWS EKS, Grafana / Loki / Mimir.

How we work

• Offices in New York, NY and San Francisco, CA — flexible in-office attendance, no fixed days per week
• We like working together in person: regular team meetups across both offices
• Small team, high ownership — most engineers ship to production in their first week
• On-call rotation for the platform, shared across the full-stack team

Benefits

• Health, dental, and vision for you and your dependents
• Substantial equity, with early exercise and an extended post-termination exercise window
• Unlimited paid vacation, plus local holidays
• Equinox membership

Compensation

Base salary: $180,000 – $250,000, adjusted based on location, level, and experience. Total compensation includes substantial equity and the benefits above.

A note on applying

If you don't tick every box on the list above, apply anyway. The bullets describe the engineer we'd be thrilled to hire; what we actually need is someone who can do the work and learn the rest. We especially encourage applications from people who don't see themselves represented in tech today.