Software Engineer​/Technical Lead; Elixir

Location:Hybrid - Boston, Chicago or remote for an outstanding candidate.

Reports to:CTO

Youth Inc. is a venture-backed e-commerce marketplace and digital media network focused exclusively on youth and high school sports. We are a technology-forward commerce platform for fan merchandise, team uniforms, and equipment alongside a media business that helps the 65M U.S. families navigating the daily opportunities and challenges of youth sports. Our team is comprised of seasoned executives from leading e-commerce brands and prominent media and technology institutions.

We’re committed to setting new industry standards and transforming the way youth sports communities engage, shop, and thrive in a rapidly growing $40B market.

We’re looking for a Staff Software Engineer / Technical Lead to take ownership of the technical integrity, coherence, and evolution of our platform as we scale.

Our marketplace business has gone from zero to one and growing rapidly with real customers, revenue, and operational complexity. The system works and we’re at the stage where strong technical leadership is essential to keep it clean, fast, understandable, and evolvable as the surface area grows.

In this role, you’ll be the person engineers look to for architectural judgment, system-level decisions, and code quality while remaining deeply hands-on in production code. You’ll partner closely with the CTO on direction and priorities, but you’ll operate independently day to day, owning technical outcomes from end to end.

If you enjoy building durable systems, mentoring strong engineers, and making principled technical tradeoffs in a growing startup, this role is designed for you.

• Backend:
  Elixir / Phoenix
• Data:
  PostgreSQL
• APIs: REST
• Search:
  Meilisearch
• Infrastructure:
  Linux, Docker, CI/CD
• Frontend:
  Next.js, React
• CMS:
  Payload CMS (frontend-driven; backend integration)

• Serve as the primary technical authority for the engineering team
• Own architectural decisions, tradeoffs, and long-term technical direction
• Lead design discussions and write clear design docs for significant changes
• Guide the evolution of data models, APIs, and system boundaries
• Partner with the CTO on high-level architecture and prioritization while operating independently day to day
• Be accountable for keeping the system understandable as complexity increases

• Design, build, and maintain Elixir/Phoenix services in production
• Own complex or high-impact backend work (performance, correctness, scalability)
• Improve system reliability, observability, and operational clarity
• Raise the bar on code quality through example, not bureaucracy

• Set and enforce a strong, pragmatic code review standard
• Help engineers reason about tradeoffs, not just implementations
• Ensure the system remains understandable as it grows
• Reduce technical debt through intentional refactoring, not rewrites

• Mentor senior and junior engineers technically
• Help engineers level up their architectural and systems thinking
• Be a sounding board for design questions before they escalates
• Create an environment where strong engineers do their best work

• You won’t handle HR, performance plans, or people management
• You won’t be a ticket machine

This is a technical leadership role, not an engineering management role.

• Hybrid:
  Metro Boston, Chicago, or fully remote for an exceptional candidate
• Small team, high trust:
  You own what you ship
• Fast but disciplined:
  Small batches, frequent deploys, intentional tradeoffs
• Real production systems:
  No toy problems, no busywork
• Strong opinions, loosely held:
  We value judgment and clarity

We actively encourage the use of AI tools (e.g. Claude, Codex) as productivity accelerators.

However:

• You are fully responsible for the code you ship
• You must understand what the AI produces
• You should be able to explain, debug, and improve AI-assisted work

AI has read the docs, but you understand systems, our business and the world. AI is a copilot—not an autopilot.

• 7+…