Senior Full Stack Engineer

Senior Full Stack Engineer

Boston, Massachusetts, United States Owl Labs is looking for a Senior Full Stack Engineer to build customer-facing product experiences and the backend systems that support them. You'll work across frontend, backend, cloud infrastructure, and device-connected workflows, partnering cross-functionally to ship high-quality software in an evolving, fast-paced environment.

WHAT YOU'LL DO:

• Build and ship customer-facing features across the Owl Labs customer portal — a React + Vite SPA used daily by customers to manage their devices.
• Drive and contribute to active codebase migrations (i.e. JavaScript → Type Script) to improve reliability, safety, and long-term maintainability.
• Own performance work: identify and fix bottlenecks through virtualization, memoization, code splitting, and bundle optimization.
• Work within and occasionally extend our shared design system, contributing reusable components and UX improvements.
• Write unit tests as a standard part of every change and contribute to our Playwright e2e suite to keep the portal stable as it evolves.
• Design, build, and operate backend services on AWS (Lambda, ECS, API Gateway, S3, IAM) that power the customer portal and device management workflows.
• Model and query data across PostgreSQL and DynamoDB, choosing the right store for the job and optimizing indexes, access patterns, and query performance.
• Implement IoT communication flows using MQTT and Web Sockets, integrating with AWS IoT Core and other messaging services to manage fleets of connected devices.
• Build decoupled, event-driven systems using queues and event buses (SQS, SNS, Event Bridge) to keep the platform scalable and resilient under load.
• Ship and iterate on RESTful APIs and Web Socket endpoints consumed by frontends and edge devices, with careful attention to versioning, latency, and reliability.
• Instrument services with logging, metrics, and tracing (Cloud Watch, X-Ray, Honeycomb or equivalents) to quickly debug and triage production issues.
• Use feature flags to release changes safely, run experiments, and coordinate complex migrations across frontend and backend surfaces.
• Define and maintain BDD/E2E test suites (Playwright, Cypress) that validate behavior end-to-end across web, APIs, and device interactions.
• Own and improve CI/CD pipelines (e.g., Bitbucket) so deployments are predictable, repeatable, and easy to roll back when needed.
• Proactively leverage AI tools (e.g., Claude, Codex) to accelerate development, automate repetitive tasks, and keep documentation, tests, and infra configuration up to date.
• Collaborate with product, design, and hardware/firmware teams, contributing technical insight into roadmap discussions for SaaS and IoT features.

WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR:

• BS/MS in Computer Science, Engineering, et al. or a great portfolio of web-based applications.
• Strong learning and growth mindset — you are continuously sharpening your skills across the stack (frontend, backend, cloud, IoT) and stay curious about new approaches.
• Willingness to take on hard, ambiguous challenges, break them down into tractable pieces, and lead others through uncertainty
• Resilience and comfort with failure — you experiment, learn quickly from what doesn't work, and turn those lessons into better designs and systems.
• Proven ability to deliver high-quality features and platform improvements under aggressive schedules while maintaining sound engineering judgment.
• Strong ownership mindset — you take responsibility for outcomes across the stack, from UX and APIs to data models and infrastructure, and you close loops without being asked.
• Clear, structured communication skills — you can explain tradeoffs to product and design, collaborate with firmware and hardware teams, and keep stakeholders aligned as plans evolve.
• Track record of effective cross-functional collaboration, including refining requirements, giving constructive feedback, and representing engineering in roadmap discussions.
• Ability to operate in evolving codebases and systems: you're comfortable when migrations, new features, and reliability work are all happening at once.
• Bias toward action — you move work forward, unblock others, and make…