Software Engineer

Boom; Austin (TX); On-site; USD 120,000 - 190,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Stock options

Healthcare coverage

PTO 15 days

Laptop provided

Training & development

Off-sites & travel

Job summary

Boom is hiring software engineers across levels under a single posting. Title, compensation, and scope are set during the process based on demonstrated competency, so apply once and we will place you at the right level.

We are currently focused on mid- to senior-level hires, with room to move in either direction for the right candidate. You will work closely with our founder, product and engineering leadership, our product team, and a growing group of senior engineers.

Qualifications

• 3+ years of professional web development experience.
• Strong backend development across the stack.
• Experience with Ruby or a similar backend language (Ruby, Grape/Sequel) preferred.
• Experience integrating third-party APIs, OAuth, webhooks, rate limits, and idempotency.
• Ownership of services in production with observability, on-call, and incident debugging.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and maintain user-facing products and the backend systems that power our platform.
• Contribute to and help evolve our core backend architecture with a focus on scalability and performance.
• Own your services in production, including observability, on-call rotations, and debugging real incidents.
• Collaborate with product, operations, and leadership to align technical solutions with business needs.
• Drive engineering practice through code reviews, testing, and documentation.

Skills

Backend development

Full-stack

Ruby

Node.js

React

Next.js

TypeScript

API integration

Observability

On-call

Tools

AWS

Terraform

OpenAI API

Anthropic API

LiveKit

Deepgram

ElevenLabs

Job description

Software Engineer

We hire software engineers across levels under a single posting. Title, compensation, and scope are set during the process based on demonstrated competency, so apply once and we will place you at the right level. We are currently focused on mid- to senior-level hires, with room to move in either direction for the right candidate.

Our mission

Boom is on a mission to level the playing field for the 110+ million renters in the US by making housing more flexible, affordable, and rewarding. Boom is building a suite of rental financial services for renters and property managers, including tenant screening, rent payment reporting, rent reporting-as-a-service, and a number of integrations with the largest property management systems (PMS). Boom serves renters through the Boom App and property managers via the Boom Platform. Now serving thousands of renters, Boom is led by second-time founder Rob Whiting (ex-BCG, Rubicon). It is backed by investors such as Starting Line, Clocktower Ventures, Mischief VC (Plaid CEO Zach Perret's fund), and Gilgamesh Ventures (Petal co-founders), and angels such as William Hockey (CEO of Column, founder and former CTO of Plaid) and Harry Stebbings. Boom has been profiled by Inman, Business Insider, HousingWire, and more.

Opportunity

We recently announced our Series A, and we are growing engineering to meet the demands of our B2B partners and B2C users. The roadmap ahead spans new consumer and platform products, deeper PMS integrations, and an agentic operational layer for residential real estate. Credit, identity, income, and payment data flow through our platform every day, so the systems you build carry real consequences for the people who use them.

You will work closely with our founder, product and engineering leadership, our product team, and a growing group of senior engineers. We are hiring in Austin, TX, where our leadership and product team is based.

Our engineering culture is practical and close to the product. We care about shipping work that reaches real users, holding a high bar for quality, and communicating clearly. At our size none of that is settled, so the engineers who join now have a real hand in it: the standards we hold, the tools we adopt, how we use AI, and how we hire. If that sounds like how you want to work, we would like to hear from you.

What you’ll do

Every engineer here owns product in production. You will:

• Design, build, and maintain user-facing products and the backend systems that power our platform

• Contribute to and help evolve our core backend architecture, with attention to scalability and performance

• Own your services in production, including observability, on-call, and debugging real incidents

• Collaborate with product, operations, and leadership to align technical solutions with business needs

• Drive engineering practice through code review, testing, and documentation

Focus areas

Our platform spans several products, and we staff engineers against the ones where the roadmap is heaviest. Tell us in your application which of these interests you. We support engineers moving across areas over time, which primarily has happened when we spin up a new product or team.

BoomScreen. Tenant screening for property managers and the applicant flows that feed it. Work here spans screening operations tooling, the applicant experience, and integrations with the largest property management systems.

BoomReport and core platform. Rent payment reporting to the credit bureaus, rent reporting-as-a-service for partners, embedded partner surfaces, and the billing and platform services the rest of the products are built on.

BoomCRM. Leads, tasks, and workflow automation for property managers, plus the listings experience that sits on top of it.

AI and agents. Customer-facing production AI features across every product, plus standalone agents for leasing, application, and underwriting. Own the full agent stack: prompts, tools, memory, retrieval, orchestration, evals, and observability. Build the eval and feedback loops that let us improve agents without regressions, including offline evals, online metrics, and human review queues.

We also have products in development that we have not announced yet.

What you’ll need

This list describes the engineer we picture, not a checklist we score against. If you meet most of it and the work sounds like yours, apply. We would rather read your application and talk it through than have you screen yourself out.

Required of every engineer, at any level:

• 3+ years of professional web development experience

• Strong backend development skills, with a preference for engineers who work comfortably across the stack

• Experience with Ruby, or with a similar backend language plus the ability to ramp up quickly in our stack. Our backend primarily runs on Ruby (Grape and Sequel), with a growing number of services in Node.js, and React/Next.js and TypeScript on the frontend

• Experience integrating third-party APIs, including OAuth flows, webhooks, rate limits, and idempotency

• A track record of owning services in production, with real exposure to observability, on-call rotations, and incident debugging

• You use AI coding agents in your daily work and have shipped real code with them. Claude Code is part of how we build here, and we expect you to reach for it and to keep getting better with it

• Strong communication skills. You are comfortable collaborating across teams and explaining technical concepts clearly

• Comfort setting your own direction in an early-stage environment where priorities shift and context is incomplete

• Empathy for our end users, including low-to-moderate-income renters, and a desire to build products that make a difference

Level and compensation

We are hiring primarily at the mid to senior range, with flexibility in either direction for the right candidate. Title, scope, and compensation are set during the process based on the experience and competency you demonstrate rather than years or prior titles. The range listed above is directional and adjustable based on competency, including for candidates whose experience puts them above the scope described here.

Nice to have

Depending on your focus area, some of the following are a plus:

• Running coding agents autonomously, including cloud or overnight sessions, and a point of view on how to structure work so that pays off

• Building and maintaining APIs and tooling that other developers consume, including partner-facing integrations and MCP tools

• AWS, Terraform, and infrastructure work generally

• 1-2 years building production LLM features or agents, hands-on with Anthropic or OpenAI APIs and agent patterns such as tool use, structured outputs, RAG, and multi-step planning

• A track record with evals. You have built or owned an eval suite and know the difference between a demo that impresses and a system that works at scale

• Product judgment and taste for LLM products. You can articulate what a model should not do, where to put guardrails, when to fall back to deterministic logic, and what UX makes errors tolerable

• Voice AI stacks (LiveKit, Deepgram, ElevenLabs), vector stores, and retrieval pipelines

• A working grasp of common attack classes such as the OWASP Top 10, auth and session flaws, and supply chain risk, and the habit of building secure-by-default paths in code you own

• Experience championing AI adoption with non-technical teammates and meeting them where they are

Benefits of working at Boom

• Competitive salary with stock options

• Full healthcare coverage (health, dental, vision) including 50% coverage for dependents

• 15 days of Paid Time Off (PTO) per year, 3 sick days, and all US federal holidays (11 in total). Note: we think unlimited PTO is BS and causes some employees to feel guilty when they take it

• Company-issued laptop/MacBook

• Company-sponsored training and development

• Regular off-sites, retreats, and other company-sponsored events and travel opportunities