Full-Stack Software Engineer

Straia; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 150,000 - 180,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Platinum health insurance

Dental benefits

Vision benefits

Equity compensation

Job summary

Straia in San Francisco is looking for a Full Stack Engineer to collaborate with the engineering team, from frontend to backend, to enhance institutional data processing. This position offers the chance to manage product features end-to-end, ensuring a seamless user experience while incorporating AI functionalities.

The ideal candidate will have 4-6 years of experience in web application development and be eager to learn about AI integration. The company provides competitive compensation ranging from $150K to $180K, plus equity.

Qualifications

• 4-6 years of experience in building and shipping web applications.
• Strong frontend skills with modern frameworks, especially React.
• Solid backend experience with Node.js and TypeScript.

Responsibilities

• Own features end-to-end from design to delivery.
• Build user interfaces for AI interactions.
• Ensure low latency for data processing.

Skills

Full stack development

React

Node.js

TypeScript

Postgres

DuckDB

API development

AI integration

Job description

The Role

As a Full Stack Engineer, you'll work across our entire stack with our CTO Nikki and the rest of the engineering team — from the React frontend to the Node/TypeScript backend — to build the product surface where institutions interact with their data and AI agents. This is a 0 → 1 opportunity to ship features end‑to‑end on a product that moves institutional data at scale, runs privately hosted frontier models, and delivers low‑latency insights to non‑technical users making real decisions about student outcomes. You'll own meaningful chunks of the product from day one — designing, building, and shipping the interfaces and APIs that turn messy institutional data into clear, actionable answers. We move fast, keep the loop between idea and production short, and trust engineers to take real ownership of what they build.

What You’ll Do

• Ship features end‑to‑end — Own work across the whole stack, from the React + Vite frontend to the Node + Express + TypeScript backend. You'll take features from design through delivery and iteration, and you'll care about how they feel for the people using them.
• Build the AI agent experience — Create the interfaces and APIs where non‑technical users ask questions and get back insights, visualizations, and automated workflows. You'll make AI feel like a natural, first‑class part of the product.
• Connect the product to data and models — Wire the application layer up to our data stack (Postgres + DuckDB) and model inference, and keep query and inference latency low enough that the product feels instantaneous.
• Own your work end‑to‑end — You won't just pick up tickets. You'll scope, build, and ship features with real autonomy, make pragmatic calls under ambiguity, and take genuine ownership of the things you deliver.
• Build internal tooling and automations — Help build the leverage that lets a small team operate like one ten times its size, automating away the things that slow engineers down.
• Care about quality and resilience — Treat observability, testing, and fault tolerance as part of the job, not an afterthought. You build things that are easy to understand, debug, and recover.

Who You Are

• Strong full‑stack background — 4‑6 years building and shipping production web applications across the stack, comfortable moving between frontend and backend in the same week.
• Fluent on the frontend — Solid experience with a modern frontend framework (React preferred) and an eye for building clean, intuitive interfaces for real users.
• Solid on the backend — Experienced building and operating production backend services and APIs, ideally in Node.js / TypeScript, with a good grasp of databases and data modeling.
• Comfortable with data — You've worked with relational databases and APIs in production. Experience with analytical or columnar databases (DuckDB, BigQuery) is a strong plus.
• Curious about AI integration — You don't need to be an ML engineer, but you're excited to integrate LLMs and models into a product and learn what makes inference reliable and fast at scale. Prior experience wrapping models or third‑party APIs is a bonus.
• High agency — You take ownership, drive features from blank page to production, and don't wait to be told what to do next. You communicate your reasoning clearly and know when to move fast versus when to align first.
• Mission‑driven — Excited about using technology to help universities make smarter, faster, more equitable decisions for their students.

Our Stack

• Cloud: GCP managed via Pulumi
• Data Layer: Postgres + DuckDB
• LLM Inference: Privately Hosted Frontier Model on GCP, plus API integrations with GPT, Gemini, and Claude
• Backend: Node.js + Express + TypeScript
• Frontend: React + Vite

What We Offer

• Compensation: $150 K – $180 K + equity
• Location: San Francisco (in office 4 days a week)
• Benefits: Health (platinum insurance), dental, and vision