Senior Software Engineer, Next.JS

The Motley Fool

2d•$165,000 - $185,000•Remote

About The Position

The Fool.com team owns the public-facing experience that millions of readers, search engine crawlers, and prospective subscribers hit every day. The team is looking for an engineer who can own the server-side and infrastructure layer of the site alongside existing front-end engineers. This is a full-stack role with a clear weighting toward the parts of the system that run before pixels reach the browser — API integrations, server-rendered routes, caching, observability, deployment, and the SEO-critical surface that determines how millions of crawler requests resolve. Much of fool.com is server side rendered.

Requirements

5+ years of professional software engineering experience, with meaningful time spent on the server side of a production web application.
Strong TypeScript and Next.js experience, including the App Router, server components, route handlers, ISR, and streaming.
Demonstrated track record integrating third-party APIs in production, with clear opinions about how to do it safely.
Solid grounding in caching (Redis or equivalent) and CDN behavior (Cloudflare or equivalent), including cache invalidation, stale-while-revalidate patterns, and edge vs. origin tradeoffs.
Comfort with AWS, Docker, and modern CI/CD workflows.
Working knowledge of how SEO crawlers actually see a site: how Googlebot renders JavaScript, what causes soft 404s, how canonical and hreflang tags affect indexing, what Core Web Vitals look like in CrUX vs. lab data, and how to think about crawl budget on a large site.
Production observability instincts — you reach for DataDog dashboards, logs, and traces before guessing.
Experience writing maintainable end-to-end tests with Playwright, Cypress, or similar.

Nice To Haves

Background on a high-traffic content, media, or publishing site where SEO is a primary acquisition channel.
Hands-on work with structured data (JSON-LD, schema.org), automated sitemaps, Search Console, or auditing tools like Screaming Frog.
Familiarity with analytics and event pipelines (Segment, PostHog, GTM, or similar).
Prior work on subscription, paywall, or e-commerce flows.
Genuine interest in financial markets, investing, or fintech.

Responsibilities

Build and maintain server-side features in our Next.js App Router codebase using TypeScript — route handlers, server components, server actions, streaming, ISR, and revalidation strategy.
Design and harden integrations with the third-party APIs that power our content, market data, and subscription experiences. This includes handling timeouts, retries, circuit breakers, fallbacks, and graceful degradation when upstream services misbehave.
Own caching strategy across Redis and Cloudflare, balancing freshness against performance, cost, and crawler behavior.
Deploy and operate services on AWS using Docker, with first-class instrumentation in DataDog so we catch issues before our readers and crawlers do.
Write meaningful end-to-end coverage with Microsoft Playwright for the flows that matter most.
Optimize the site for the way it's actually consumed by SEO crawlers: rendering strategy, structured data, sitemap generation, canonicalization, hreflang, robots directives, performance budgets, and crawl budget management.
Partner with our front-end engineers on the seam between server and client, and collaborate with content, marketing, SEO, and platform teams across the company.
Use AI-assisted development tools (Claude Code, Cursor) as a core part of your daily workflow.
Integrate with our CMS for content management.