Senior Software Engineer

Cast & Crew•Burbank, CA

About The Position

At Cast & Crew, we have empowered creativity and supported the global entertainment industry for decades. Together with our family of brands – Backstage, CAPS, Checks & Balances, Final Draft, Media Services, Sargent-Disc, and The TEAM Companies – we operate as a combined entertainment technology and services provider offering industry standard screenwriting accounting software, digital payroll products, data & reporting, and a host of creative tools. The industry continues to move faster than ever, and the need for our expertise, our technology, and our people has never been greater. We are a production’s best ally every step of the way. Cast & Crew is seeking a Senior Full Stack Software Engineer to design, build, and operate applications used daily across the entertainment production ecosystem. This is a hands-on senior role for an engineer who can lead technical initiatives end-to-end — from scoping ambiguous problems with product and design partners, through architecture and implementation, into production operation and iterative improvement. Senior engineers in this role work across the stack — developing React-based user interfaces and Node.js backend services, integrating AI-enabled workflows, document processing pipelines, and event-driven architectures. You will act as a technical lead on substantial features or services, drive cross-team alignment on shared platforms and patterns, and be accountable for the total cost of ownership of the systems you build: the cost to develop, to run, to monitor, to change, and to retire. At Cast & Crew, engineers own the systems they build and run. Our platforms support mission-critical workflows across the entertainment industry, where reliability, accountability, and clarity of thought matter as much as raw technical skill. We hire engineers who take responsibility for the full lifecycle of their work — design, delivery, operation, and long-term health — and who raise the bar for the people and systems around them. Senior engineers here are expected to shape technical direction, mentor peers, and work comfortably across team and organizational boundaries to move the platform forward.

Requirements

7+ years of professional software engineering experience, with demonstrated depth on customer-facing web applications at scale
Track record of technical leadership on non-trivial initiatives — scoping, designing, and delivering systems that span multiple services or teams
Strong experience with React frontend development, including state management, performance tuning, and component architecture for large codebases
Strong experience with Node.js / TypeScript backend development, including API design, error handling, and service composition
Strong experience with SQL and NoSQL data stores, including schema design, query performance, and data modeling tradeoffs
Experience designing and operating REST and/or GraphQL APIs that are consumed by multiple clients or teams
Experience working with event-driven architectures, including tradeoffs between synchronous, asynchronous, and event-sourced patterns
Experience with AWS cloud services and cloud-native application design
Working knowledge of Kubernetes / EKS environments, including deployment, scaling, and troubleshooting
Experience with Git, CI/CD pipelines, and Azure DevOps
Experience supporting production systems — on-call rotations, incident response, postmortems, and follow-through on preventative work
Familiarity with AI-assisted development tools, prompt engineering, and LLM-assisted coding workflows
Experience working with document processing systems or structured document data
Strong written and verbal communication — able to write clear design docs, facilitate technical discussions, and explain tradeoffs to engineering and non-engineering stakeholders

Nice To Haves

Experience leading migrations, re-platforming efforts, or major refactors of production systems
Experience with micro-frontend architectures and Module Federation
Experience with AI agent orchestration frameworks
Experience with distributed messaging systems (Kafka, SQS/SNS, EventBridge, etc.)
Experience with document ingestion pipelines and OCR / extraction workflows
Experience with observability and monitoring platforms (New Relic, Datadog, OpenTelemetry, etc.)
Experience mentoring mid-level engineers and helping grow the engineering practice
Experience partnering directly with product management, design, and security to shape roadmaps

Responsibilities

Design, build, and operate applications used daily across the entertainment production ecosystem.
Lead technical initiatives end-to-end — from scoping ambiguous problems with product and design partners, through architecture and implementation, into production operation and iterative improvement.
Develop React-based user interfaces and Node.js backend services.
Integrate AI-enabled workflows, document processing pipelines, and event-driven architectures.
Act as a technical lead on substantial features or services.
Drive cross-team alignment on shared platforms and patterns.
Be accountable for the total cost of ownership of the systems you build: the cost to develop, to run, to monitor, to change, and to retire.
Shape technical direction.
Mentor peers.
Work comfortably across team and organizational boundaries to move the platform forward.
Build React-based user interfaces supporting complex production workflows, with a focus on performance, accessibility, and long-term maintainability.
Build Node.js backend services powering event-driven applications, designed for observability and operational resilience.
Build APIs and services that integrate with internal and external platforms, including identity providers, data warehouses, and partner systems.
Build Cloud-native services running in containerized environments, with clear deployment, rollback, and disaster-recovery stories.
Build Features that automate and simplify real-world operational processes for production accounting, payroll, residuals, and related workflows.
Build Shared libraries, patterns, and tooling that raise the baseline for other engineers across the organization.
Own the design, delivery, and operation of sizeable features or services.
Write design docs, drive alignment, and make the calls on architecture, dependencies, and sequencing.
Partner with engineers on adjacent teams — platform, data, security, infrastructure — to land changes that cross ownership boundaries.
Represent your team in shared forums and technical reviews.
Raise the bar through code review, pairing, and mentorship.
Help mid-level engineers grow into senior work.
Push back thoughtfully when designs or PRs aren't ready.
Work directly with PM and design on scoping, tradeoffs, and sequencing.
Translate ambiguous product goals into concrete technical plans.
Push back on scope when needed and propose alternatives when the original approach is too costly.
Participate in on-call, drive incident response, and lead blameless postmortems.
Close the loop on operational issues by turning findings into engineering work.
Weigh the full lifecycle cost of technical decisions — not just time-to-first-deploy, but the cost to run, monitor, secure, change, and eventually retire a system.
Favor solutions that stay cheap over their full life.