Senior Software Engineer

For 20 years, Ladders has connected ambitious professionals with $100K+ opportunities, now serving over 8 million members. We're a profitable, small, collaborative, venture-backed team in NYC that moves fast, ships real products, and applies AI in ways that genuinely help people land better careers.

We're looking for a thoughtful Senior Full-Stack Engineer(6+ years experience) who thrives owning problems end-to-end. You'll design and build AI-powered features that reach millions of job seekers, make pragmatic architectural decisions, and balance speed with long-term quality. This is not a backlog-ticket role, we want someone who takes a concept all the way to production, not just executes what's handed to them.

This is a NY based role with regular in-office presence required (hybrid schedule).

• Design and build AI-powered products and features that deliver meaningful user impact

• Build and maintain scalable backend services and user-facing applications

• Collaborate closely with product and design team, and other engineering teams to deliver high-impact features

• Make structural technical decisions and clearly articulate trade-offs when solving complex problems

• Take ownership of a product area, service, or technical domain and drive it forward
• Continuously improve system performance, reliability, and developer experience

• 6+ years of professional software engineering experience

• Strong foundation in programming and software design principles

• Proven experience building well-scoped, performant modern web applications

• Production experience with React or Next.js and at least one of the following languages: Go, Python, or JavaScript

• Comfort navigating the full stack and pulling in what's needed to ship

• Strong ownership mindset and ability to work effectively within cross-functional teams

Nice to Have

• Experience working with AI tools, prompt engineering, or integrating AI into development workflows

• Search infrastructure experience (Elasticsearch or similar)

• Familiarity with message brokers (e.g., Kafka, RabbitMQ, AWS SQS)

• Database optimization experience (e.g., MariaDB or similar relational databases)

• Experience with modern frontend tooling (e.g., Vite)
• Background in Computer Science or equivalent practical experience

• Consistently delivers product features with high quality and strong attention to detail

• Uses AI-assisted development fluently, producing clean and maintainable code at higher velocity

• Builds strong partnerships with engineers, product and design, contributing to team and organizational growth

• Proactively surfaces problems and drives them to resolution
• Makes the codebase, the system, and the team around you measurably better over time