Staff Engineer (DTC ecommerce) - PT/FT - NA/LATAM

Reports To: Co-Founder, Co-CEO

About Needed

Needed is a leading women’s nutrition brand backed by 15,000 + practitioners, including nutritionists, dietitians, naturopathic doctors, midwives, and OB-GYNs. We champion anti-depletion nutrition for women through a clinically-backed system of supplements that support every stage of the Motherspan™ — from fertility and pregnancy through postpartum and beyond.

Position Summary

We’re seeking a pragmatic, high-leverage Staff Engineer to lead Needed’s technical execution across our website, growth infrastructure, and applied AI initiatives. This person will serve as the company’s lead technical builder, owning the health and performance of our web ecosystem while partnering cross-functionally to deploy new features, improve user experience, and bring development fully in-house.

This role spans hands-on engineering leadership and practical AI enablement. In addition to maintaining and improving the website codebase, this person will support commercial and operational AI use cases across the organization, with an initial focus on growth-related workflows and customer-facing experiences.

Key Responsibilities

Own the Technology Stack

1. Own Needed's full technology stack end to end: hosting and infrastructure, the codebase, deployments, monitoring, data pipelines, and marketing technology, including technological and vendor choices for e-commerce, growth, agentic deployments, etc.
2. Execute on any digital initiatives to drive business growth and mature the technology stack
3. Maintain and improve the production codebase: quality, performance, reliability, and maintainability.
4. Set the technical standards, tooling, and decisions for anything touching our systems - balancing speed, cost, and long-term durability.

Drive Business Impact

1. Partner with cross function teams to translate commercial, growth, and product priorities into experiments and features that move conversion, retention, and customer experience.
2. Proactively surface technical risks and opportunities that affect business performance, and make confident build-vs-buy recommendations.
3. Build a credible technical roadmap: what exists, what's holding us back, and what to build, rebuild, or retire and in what order.

Lead Applied Technology & AI

1. Support the company’s transition to AI, with an AI native and AI pilled perspective, bringing a passion for building and adopting new tools, bringing technical thought leadership to Needed’s team
2. Serve as Needed's internal authority on applied technology, with a focus on where AI adds leverage in our operations and our product.
3. Identify, build, and maintain practical AI-enabled tools and workflows - commercial and operational use cases first, then organization-wide.
4. Enable non-technical teams to adopt and troubleshoot new tools, and spot high-leverage automation opportunities.

Communicate & Collaborate

1. Act as the bridge between what's technically possible and what the business needs to prioritize.
2. Explain technical tradeoffs clearly to the leadership team and give rationale based recommendations
3. Work cross-functionally to unblock teams and keep technical execution aligned with company goals.

Qualifications

Must Haves*

1. 5–10+ years of hands-on software engineering experience, with meaningful time in DTC ecommerce, health/wellness, or consumer subscription brands.
2. Deep fluency with modern web stacks—Shopify or Shopify Headless preferred, React/Next.js, and the surrounding ecommerce toolchain (Recharge, Klaviyo, analytics integrations).
3. Proven ability to own and improve a production codebase without a large team around you.
4. Experience building or integrating AI/ML features in production, including LLM-based applications.
5. Business-first mindset: you prioritize by impact, not technical interest. You know what’s worth building now and what can wait.
6. Clear, direct communicator - you can explain technical tradeoffs and provide recommendations to a non-technical leadership team
7. High agency and self-direction: you thrive without a detailed backlog handed to you and can manage your own sequencing.
8. Familiarity with data pipelining, analytics, and marketing technology.

Nice to Haves

1. Experience with practitioner or HCP channel technology (portals, onboarding flows, referral systems).
2. Prior work at a brand that scaled from $50M-$100M, ideally in a solo or very small technical team.
3. Experience with subscription ecommerce and the technical complexities it introduces (billing, dunning, cohort tracking).
4. Strong technical SEO knowledge: Core Web Vitals, structured data, crawlability, site architecture.
5. Background in women’s health, nutrition, or wellness—or a strong affinity for the mission.