Fullstack Software Engineer

Samba•San Francisco, CA

22h•Onsite

About The Position

Samba TV is a media intelligence company that leverages consented, large-scale viewership and consumer data to assist major brands in making informed decisions about audience reach and understanding. The company is developing a new AI-powered product featuring a real-time, conversational interface. This system is designed to research, reason, and produce tangible deliverables such as interactive charts, data views, structured outputs, and downloadable documents. The product is built on a modern, AI-native, type-safe codebase and operates at a global scale. The company is seeking a Senior Full Stack Engineer to join their engineering team in San Francisco. This role is a comprehensive full-stack position, covering the entire request lifecycle, including an AI/agent backend, a Node/TypeScript service layer, and a React streaming UI. The engineer will contribute across all these areas and play a key role in architectural direction. While the front-end is a component of the job, the role also involves leading front-end work when necessary.

Requirements

Senior full-stack engineer with experience owning significant features and systems end-to-end across services, APIs, and UI, operating with autonomy.
Proficiency in JavaScript/TypeScript and Node.js, writing clean, type-safe code and reasoning about data over REST and SSE.
Meaningful, hands-on React experience and a solid grasp of the web platform, with judgment on complex areas like streaming and asynchronous state, reconnection, failure handling, rendering performance, and accessibility.
Ability to reach for AI tools to increase speed while owning the correctness of shipped code.
Capability to lead front-end work when needed, without it being the primary focus.
Architectural thinking skills, including weighing trade-offs, writing clear design documents, and explaining technical concepts.
Experience shaping the technical direction of a team.
Solid understanding of relational databases (PostgreSQL) and SQL.
Proficiency with Git and CI/CD.
Understanding of application deployment to the cloud (AWS, GCP, or Azure) and operating shipped applications.
Ability to explain technical ideas clearly, provide constructive reviews, and elevate the skills of those around you.
Openness to feedback and ability to disagree constructively.
A Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience.
Typically 6+ years of professional full stack / web application development experience, including experience providing technical leadership on a team.

Nice To Haves

Experience with a modern SSR/full-stack React framework (Next.js, Remix, or TanStack Start) and its ecosystem (Query, Form, Router).
Familiarity with AI / LLM application development, including streaming chat UIs, tool-calling, or agentic/multi-agent patterns.
Experience building real-time or streaming interfaces (SSE, WebSockets) and associated UX patterns.
Familiarity with type-safe API contracts (tRPC, Hono RPC, or GraphQL) shared across a monorepo.
Comfort with modern tooling such as pnpm monorepos, Vite, and a TypeScript-first workflow.
Experience with authentication flows (Auth0, OAuth/OIDC, JWTs) in single-page or SSR applications.
Familiarity with observability tooling (Sentry, OpenTelemetry, Prometheus/Grafana, or similar) for debugging and operating production systems.
Experience in AdTech, MediaTech, or data-heavy product environments.
Knowledge of scripting languages (Python, Go, or shell) for automation and testing.

Responsibilities

Design across the whole system, making and documenting architectural decisions for the AI/backend engine, service layer, and UI, including orchestration boundaries, streaming protocols, type-safe client-to-server contracts, artifact and file-delivery flows, persistence, and error/reconnection strategies.
Translate ambiguous product goals into actionable designs for the team.
Build on the backend and AI layer, extending backend services, wiring model interactions and structured outputs, handling streaming, managing state and persistence, and reasoning about latency, cost, and failure modes.
Own the service layer by extending the Node backend-for-frontend, building endpoints, streaming responses (SSE) to the browser, enforcing authentication, and maintaining end-to-end type safety.
Ship UI and provide front-end coverage by building a streaming, chat-style interface in React on a modern SSR framework, implementing live token streams, progress indicators, inline interactive content, and transforming structured data into interactive charts, tables, and document previews (PPTX, PDF).
Provide technical guidance to the team, setting standards in code reviews, contributing to design documents, and assisting other engineers with the AI-native codebase.
Identify and mitigate risks related to performance, complexity, and streaming-state edge cases before they impact the product.
Ensure correct implementation of streaming and asynchronous operations, including handling partial/streaming state, loading/generating transitions, reconnection, large payload management, and graceful failure handling.
Improve quality by writing unit, integration, and end-to-end tests, instrumenting shipped code, and utilizing logs, traces, and error tracking for debugging across UI and services.
Develop a working model of system behavior and dependencies to make informed product and implementation decisions.
Collaborate with product, design, and platform/backend engineers, and mentor other engineers through reviews, pairing, and clear technical writing.
Partner with product, design, and platform/backend engineers, and level up the engineers around you through review, pairing, and clear technical writing.