Senior Software Engineer

About Us 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. The Role 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).

What You’ll Do • 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

What We’re Looking For • 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

What Success Looks Like • 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

What We Offer • Competitive compensation: base salary $200,000 ~ $220,000 + stock options

• Home office setup stipend

• Gym membership reimbursement

• Commuter benefits program

• Comprehensive health coverage: medical, dental, and vision

• 401(k) retirement plan

• Health Savings Account (HSA), Health Care FSA (HCFSA), and Dependent Care FSA (DCFSA)

We know that great candidates don’t always check every box. If you’re excited about this role, we strongly encourage you to apply, even if you don’t meet every listed qualification. The products we’re building have meaningful social impact, and we believe that diverse experiences and viewpoints make that work stronger. We’re committed to building an inclusive team and would love to hear from you.