Senior Software Engineer

Overview

Job Title: Sr. Software Engineer

Location: Remote

Reports to: CEO

Role Type: Full-Time

We're looking for an experienced software engineer to take a senior, high-ownership role building the future of ApprentiScope. ApprentiScope is the platform that employers, workforce intermediaries, and educational institutions use to run Registered Apprenticeship programs — and we’re growing fast. You'll own major parts of our stack end-to-end, drive the architecture decisions that shape where the product goes next, and work closely with the CEO and leadership team to set our technical direction.

This is a rare combination: the autonomy and impact of a founding engineer, paired with the stability of a company that already has real customers, real revenue, and strong retention. You'll own the full stack end-to-end, set our technical direction, ship features our customers depend on every day, and lay the foundation for the engineering team we grow.

What You'll Do
Own the Codebase & Ship Product

1. Take end-to-end ownership of our entire stack, including frontend, backend, infrastructure, CI/CD, QA, reliability and integrations
2. Ship customer-facing features from spec to production, balancing speed with the reliability our customers run their programs on
3. Drive continuous improvement and quality, triaging and resolving incoming bug reports, improving site speed and responsiveness, and steadily raising the quality bar across the product
4. Build new product surfaces, from field-friendly data capture to AI-driven program intelligence
5. Partner directly with the CEO and customers to translate compliance and workforce needs into working software

Set Technical Direction

1. Make architectural decisions in collaboration with our CEO that shape the next phase of the product — what to build, what to refactor, what to buy
2. Establish the engineering practices, standards, and tooling that a growing team will build on
3. Own build-vs-buy and tech-debt tradeoffs — keep the system simple enough to move fast and solid enough to scale
4. Be the technical voice in product, customer onboarding and roadmapping

Reliability, Security & Performance

1. Own production reliability, monitoring, and incident response (Sentry, Better Stack)
2. Maintain and advance our security and compliance posture, including SOC 2 (Snyk, vulnerability scanning, audit logging)
3. Diagnose and resolve performance bottlenecks across serverless functions and data access
4. Keep the platform our customers depend on just working — you're the person ultimately responsible for that

Our Stack

1. Language: Node.js + Typescript
2. Frontend: Vue.js
3. Backend: Google Cloud Platform (GCP) serverless architecture

What You Bring
Required Experience

1. 7+ years building and shipping production software, with significant time as a senior or lead engineer at an early-stage or small company
2. Deep expertise in TypeScript / Node.js across the full stack
3. Hands-on experience with cloud and serverless architectures — GCP ideal, but AWS or equivalent translates well
4. Experience designing data models and working with NoSQL databases
5. A track record of owning systems end-to-end — you've been the person responsible for a production codebase, not one contributor among many
6. Experience building third-party integrations and APIs
7. Sound, independent judgment on architecture and on the tradeoff between quality and speed
8. Experience leveraging AI tools (Claude Code/Cursor/Codex) in the software development process

Nice to Have

1. Experience building AI/LLM-powered product features
2. Background in workforce, edtech, govtech, or other compliance-heavy B2B domains

Personal Attributes

1. Extreme ownership: You treat the whole system as yours and don't wait for permission to fix what's broken
2. Comfortable with ambiguity: You make good decisions with incomplete information and figure things out as you go
3. Pragmatic builder: You ship, you balance polish with momentum, and you know when to invest in foundations vs. move fast
4. Product- and customer-minded: You care about outcomes for users and the business, not just elegant code
5. Direct and low-ego: You communicate clearly, give and take honest feedback, and value substance over ceremony
6. Energized by being early: You're excited to be the first dedicated engineer and to help build the team and culture that comes next

Benefits

1. Health Insurance
2. Paid Time Off
3. Paid Family Medical Leave
4. Parental Leave
5. Bereavement Leave
6. Educational Leave
7. Work from Home Stipend

Compensation

1. Base Salary: $130,000
2. Equity: significant early-stage stock options