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)