The Role:As one of the earliest engineers at Short Story, this is a
high-impact opportunity to shape our technology, product experience, and engineering culture. You'll work end-to-end across both customer-facing and internal platforms, building the tools our customers and stylists rely on every day. From designing resilient backend services to scaling design systems and refining order flows, you'll play a central role in how we deliver style and customer happiness at scale.
At this stage of our company, a Staff Engineer isn't just a strong coder - you're a
technical leader, problem solver, and multiplier. You'll collaborate closely with designers, PMs, and operators, but also look around corners: identifying bottlenecks, shaping architectural decisions, and driving the engineering culture that will set us up for the next chapter of growth.
What You'll Do:- Design, build, and scale full-stack applications with technologies like Next.js, React Query, TailwindCSS, Node.js, and PostgreSQL.
- Drive technical direction: influence architecture, make trade-offs, and establish engineering standards that balance speed and scalability.
- Collaborate cross-functionally with design, product, and operations to deliver solutions end-to-end, from UI to backend services.
- Translate Figma designs into seamless, interactive experiences while ensuring backend integrations are robust and performant.
- Use data to drive impact: A/B test, instrument, and iterate to improve user experience and business outcomes.
- Multiply team effectiveness: mentor engineers, lead design reviews, and raise the technical bar.
- Ensure quality and reliability: drive testing and automation across the stack (Cypress, Jest, React Testing Library, integration tests).
- Own deployment and operations: manage apps on Netlify, AWS, or equivalent, and build CI/CD pipelines with GitHub Actions.
- Champion engineering culture: set standards around performance, security, accessibility, and technical excellence.
Must Haves:- You are passionate about improving the user experience and have built and launched high-quality user-facing products.
- You're fluent in TypeScript and CSS, and have extensive experience building scalable applications using NextJS and ReactJS
- You have hands-on experience with React-Query, Tailwind CSS, and front-end tooling like Webpack and Yarn
- You've worked in collaborative development environments using Git and GitHub
- You've translated designs from Figma into elegant and accessible interfaces across multiple devices and browsers
- You are able to establish testing practices and methodologies for the team
- You understand how to optimize front-end performance and build for scalability
- You're thoughtful about documentation, communication, and team enablement
- You thrive in fast-paced, ambiguous environments where you can own solutions end-to-end
- You're excited by ambiguity and love solving complex problems from end to end
Nice to Haves:- You have 5+ years of experience in professional front-end development
- Experience working in a fast-moving startup environment
- Experience integrating/building component systems and libraries for large codebases
- Have experience with server-side rendering (SSR) and static site generation (SSG)
- Have worked on sprint-based teams using OKRs or similar frameworks
- Have experience working remotely with global teams
- Have led or built a front-end engineering team before
- Have contributed to open-source or have a strong portfolio of personal project
Location:- We are hiring in SF, US (fully remote), and Canada (fully remote)
Compensation and Benefits:- Comprehensive health, vision, and dental care
- 401k with company match (US)
- Generous paid time off
- Opportunity to work at a Y-Combinator backed startup alongside a dedicated and experienced founding team
- Company wide and team events
