Senior Frontend Software Engineer

## About the Role We're hiring a Senior Front-End Engineer to build the products that bring Backpack's payment infrastructure to life. You'll own our user-facing applications end to end - starting with two greenfield products, the Provider Portal and the Bursar Portal, which you'll help build from the ground up. You'll work directly with our founders and a tight engineering team to make critical product and technical decisions every week. This isn't a "build me a website" role, and it isn't "take tickets off the board." You're a product builder. You'll shape what we build, how we build it, and how it feels to use - taking a problem that's 70% defined and owning it the rest of the way to a shipped product that customers love. ## What you'll own and work on - Build new applications from scratch. We're standing up the Provider Portal and the Bursar Portal as brand-new products - you'll architect and own them end to end, from the first commit to production. - Build products, not pages. Design and ship interfaces that are a pleasure to use, grounded in a real understanding of the payment flows underneath them. - Work fluently across the stack boundary. Integrate directly with our platform APIs and backend services, shape the contracts you consume, and hold your own in architecture and data-modeling discussions with backend engineers. - Use AI to keep us lean. Lean on AI-assisted tooling and design patterns that minimize manual maintenance, so a small team can ship and operate a large surface area. - Own quality end to end: performance, accessibility, reliability, and correctness in a regulated, money-movement environment where mistakes matter. - Instrument what you ship - analytics, monitoring, and alerting - and use it to measure success in revenue and user love. - Partner directly with founders, product, and customers - university business offices, scholarship providers, and student families - to turn ambiguous problems into shipped product. ## What We're Looking For You'll thrive here if these describe how you already work: - Builder mentality: Strong opinions, weakly held. You default to shipping the smallest thing that works, then iterate fast. You'd rather have something in production learning from real usage than a perfect design doc collecting comments. - Ownership > tasks: You proactively unblock yourself and others. When something is unclear or broken, you prototype, reach out directly, pair, or just ship a pragmatic solution. - Product-minded: You obsess over the "why" behind features. You dig into customer data and measure success in revenue and user love. - AI-native: You already use Cursor, Claude, Junie, or similar every day. You treat AI as a pair programmer - not a novelty, but also not a replacement. - Start-to-finish ownership: You love owning projects end-to-end, and always implement monitoring, set up alerting, watch the metrics, and make sure it accomplishes objectives. - User-first: Every product decision should be made with the end user in mind. You build products that are a pleasure to use. - Start-to-finish ownership: You love owning projects end-to-end, and always implement monitoring, set up alerting, watch the metrics, and make sure it accomplishes objectives. - Growth-driven: You're dedicated to your own growth and have the drive to continuously learn. You actively seek feedback and push yourself into uncomfortable territory. - Customer-comfortable: You can talk to and work with customers of any kind - student families, university business offices, merchants - and put yourself in their shoes. ## Your Experience We recognize not everyone will meet all of the criteria. If you meet most of the criteria below and you're excited about the opportunity and willing to learn, we'd love to hear from you. - 7+ years of professional (non-internship) experience in front-end development and web application development - 5+ years of production level experience with JavaScript/Typescript, HTML, and CSS - 5+ years of production level experience with modern JS frameworks such as React or Vue.js. (We use React and experience with React is preferred but not required) - Experience with Postgres or other relational databases and comfortable writing SQL queries - Proficient collaborating on API design and working with REST, and GraphQL APIs - Experience with implementing testing strategies and coverage with modern front-end testing frameworks like Vitest, Jest, or Playwright - Proficiency with version control systems such as Git - Excellent communication skills and the ability to collaborate effectively within a remote team via tools like Slack, Notion, and Linear - Strong problem-solving skills with attention to detail ## Nice to Have's - Experience with Retool - Knowledge of accessibility best practices and/or building accessibility compliant (a11y) web applications - Experience with Node.JS, Next.js, Tanstack Start, and server side rendering (SSR) - Experience with scaling front-end infrastructure, CI/CD pipelines, and front-end tooling like Vite - Experience designing and/or wireframing in tools like Figma - Comfortable using infrastructure-as-code tools like Terraform - Experience working in Fintech, the financial services industry, or at early start up ## Our Tech Stack - Front-end: Typescript/JavaScript, React, Zustand, CSS, TailwindCSS, Vitest, and Vite - Backend: Node.js, Postgres, Redis, Rails, Sidekiq - Infrastructure: AWS, Docker, Terraform, CI/CD - AI: Cursor and Claude, daily - Security: AES-256 Encryption ## Compensation and Benefits ### Salary The salary range for this role is $140,000 - $190,000 ### Equity Competitive equity package ### Benefits - Medical, dental, and vision health care plans - Health care FSA/HSA plans - 401K - PTO and 10+ public holidays - Backpack Recharges — dedicated team time off to recharge ## Location New York City, NY or Austin, TX preferred (Hybrid — in-office 3-5 days). Remote (within US) an option for exceptional candidates. ## Interview Process We value transparency. Here is what you can expect: - Initial interview with one of our co-founders