Senior Full-Stack Engineer, Activation

Food has lost its soul to modern convenience. And with it, it has lost the power to nourish, inspire, and connect us. So in 2018, CookUnity was founded as the first-of-its-kind platform that connects the world with the source of truly great food: chefs. Today, CookUnity delivers 50 million meals a year from the industry’s best chefs to homes all over the country. Fresh. Ready-to-eat. And crafted with the passion that nourishes body and soul.

Unwilling to stop there, CookUnity is expanding beyond delivery to become an ever-innovating marketplace focused on our singular mission: empower Chefs to nourish the world.

If that mission has you hungry in more ways than one, you’ve found the right job posting.

The Activation Team is part of CookUnity’s Growth organization and focuses on shaping the user journey during the earliest and most critical moments of their lifecycle. The team’s mission is to turn new and returning users into loyal CookUnity customers by helping them understand the platform, build ordering habits, and experience value quickly.

The team is responsible for three key areas:

1. Activation & Onboarding: Own the onboarding and early lifecycle experience, with a strong focus on the first five weeks. This includes educating users about the platform, reducing friction, and creating experiences that encourage early repeat orders and long term loyalty.
2. Referrals: Own the end to end referrals experience for both referrers and referees, enabling existing users to invite others and driving high quality, efficient user acquisition through word of mouth.
3. Reactivation: Own the reactivation of churned or inactive users by designing experiences, messaging, and incentives that bring users back to the platform and re-establish engagement.

We are looking for a Full Stack Engineer to join the Activation Team, where you will play a key role in building and optimizing backend services and APIs that power CookUnity’s activation, referral, and reactivation experiences. This role involves working on Server-Driven UI (SDUI) services within our Backend-for-Frontend (BFF) architecture, as well as developing and maintaining backend services and databases.

As part of a cross-functional team, you will collaborate closely with product managers, mobile/web engineers, and designers to create engaging user experiences across onboarding, referrals, and reactivation flows. This is a great opportunity for someone eager to work on challenging technical problems while contributing to customer facing products that directly impact user activation, retention, and growth.

• →Develop and maintain scalable backend services and APIs that power Activation, Referral, and Reactivation experiences across mobile and web.
• →Build and iterate on user-facing experiences using a Server-Driven UI (SDUI) and BFF architecture, owning features from backend through frontend delivery.
• →Partner closely with Product, Design, and Mobile/Web engineers to deliver high-quality, end-to-end features that impact user activation and retention.
• →Optimize database queries, caching strategies, and API performance to support high-traffic, customer-facing flows.
• →Improve monitoring, observability, and logging to ensure reliability and fast issue detection.
• →Participate in code reviews, technical discussions, and architectural decisions, contributing to shared engineering standards and best practices

• 5+ years of professional experience as a Full Stack Engineer (or equivalent experience across frontend and backend)
• Strong experience building backend services using Node.js and TypeScript in production environments
• Strong experience building user facing web applications using TypeScript and React
• Solid understanding of frontend backend interactions, including state management, data fetching, and performance considerations
• Experience working with SQL databases (PostgreSQL or MySQL), including query optimization
• Familiarity with service oriented architectures and microservices
• Strong debugging and troubleshooting skills across both frontend and backend
• Solid understanding of performance optimization, including API efficiency and frontend performance
• Experience working with or contributing to established design systems
• Advanced English communication skills, with the ability to collaborate effectively across cross-functional teams
• Fluency with AI engineering tools.

• Experience with Kotlin or another JVM-based language (e.g. Java, Scala), or a strong willingness to learn Kotlin
• Proficiency with leveraging AI Coding tools in day to day development (Cursor, Windsurf, or similar).
• Experience with authentication and authorization flows (B2C, JWTs)
• Knowledge of AWS, Kubernetes, Terraform, and cloud infrastructure
• Familiarity with observability tools like DataDog and logging frameworks

We believe great leadership starts with alignment on vision, values, and ways of working. To give you deeper insight into who we are and what we’re looking for, we invite you to explore: CookUnity's Leadership Principles – The values and behaviors that guide how we operate, collaborate, and scale.

We hope this provides valuable insight into our culture and product vision. If this excites you, we’d love to connect!