We're building Backstroke—AI-powered email marketing for ecommerce brands. Right now, creating one email campaign takes brands many hours and involves many people. Strategy, design, copy, development, QA, approvals—it's slow, expensive, and leaves no time for the stuff that actually matters: testing, personalization, learning. We're rebuilding this from the ground up. Our platform generates complete, on-brand campaigns in minutes, with experimentation and personalization built in by default. We need an experienced engineer who can own large problem spaces, make strong technical decisions, and ship production features fast—while raising the bar for the whole team. You'll work alongside our small engineering team to drive architecture decisions, deliver end-to-end features, and help us scale both our product and our engineering practices. Title and scope will match your experience. What you'll do Own and drive complex features end-to-end Take loosely defined problems and turn them into shipped software. You'll make architecture and design decisions, write code, deploy, and iterate based on what you learn—without waiting for someone to hand you a spec. Raise the engineering bar Improve how we build, not just what we build. That means better patterns, smarter abstractions, clearer code, and helping less experienced engineers grow. You lead by example and through code review, pairing, and technical direction. Build with AI assistance Use Cursor, GitHub Copilot, Claude Code, or similar tools to move faster. You know when AI helps and when to turn it off. You're pushing the boundaries of AI-assisted development and helping the team do the same. Move fast with good judgment You optimize for learning loops over perfect first releases—but you know the difference between intentional shortcuts and careless ones. You ship quickly because you've built the instincts to make good trade-offs, not because you skip steps. Own what you ship You're responsible for quality, performance, and edge cases. You write tests when they matter, fix bugs quickly, instrument what you need to, and care deeply about the user experience. What we're looking for 5+ years of experience building and shipping software You've built and maintained real systems that real people depend on. You've seen things break in production, dealt with scaling challenges, and learned from the mistakes that only come from experience. Strong full-stack capabilities Our stack is Ruby on Rails (backend) and React + TypeScript (frontend), with PostgreSQL and AWS. You should be productive across the stack and able to make sound technical decisions at every layer. AI-first development mindset You've used AI coding tools (Cursor, Copilot, Claude Code, etc.) to actually build things—not just experiment. You understand how to integrate AI into a real development workflow and you're excited to keep pushing what's possible. Startup DNA You're scrappy. You figure things out. You thrive in ambiguity and can take rough direction and turn it into something shippable. You've ideally worked at an early-stage company before and know what it takes. Product-minded approach You care about what you're building and why. You ask hard questions. You think about users. You make smart trade-offs between speed and quality based on context—and you can articulate why you made the call. Technical leadership without the title You don't need to be a manager to lead. You influence through strong opinions loosely held, clear communication, and a bias toward making the people around you more effective. You'll fit right in if you: Want to own big chunks of a product, not just tickets Get excited by new AI tools and want to push them into production workflows Have strong opinions about how software should be built—and the humility to update them Think building software should be fun and creative Want to work on a small team where your judgment and experience shape the product Are energized by mentoring and making other engineers better Bonus points: You've led technical initiatives at a startup, contributed to open source, or have a track record of building systems that scaled beyond their original scope. Our values Accountability, Empathy, and Speed Compensation $140,000–$150,000 annual salary based on experience and level Backstroke is an equal opportunity employer, and we value diversity at our company. We don't discriminate based on race, religion, color, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability status.