Senior Software Engineer, Full-Stack, Platform

Popfly is building the infrastructure for the creator economy. Already the leading platform of adventure creators and brands, Popfly is a place where collaboration replaces chaos, and authentic partnerships replace transactional campaigns. Brands like GoPro, Smith Optics, and Backcountry use Popfly to discover vetted creators, collaborate through the entire creative process, and track performance that actually drives revenue. Creators use us to connect with brands they actually care about, manage their workflow, and get paid.

We’re a fast-scaling startup that’s proven product-market fit and is now racing from thousands to millions of users. Our small and nimble engineering team has built a sophisticated platform that handles everything from creator-brand matching to real-time collaboration tools, payment processing, affiliate tracking, and analytics - all purpose-built for the adventure space. We believe perfect is the enemy of shipped, and pragmatic excellence beats over-engineered solutions every time.

We’re not building one-off campaigns; we’re building the connected creator ecosystem that defines the future of authentic brand storytelling.

We’re looking for a Senior Software Engineer who thrives in the 0→100 phase of a hyper-growth startup. You’ll grow into a technical co-leader who doesn’t just execute tasks but owns entire domains, architects scalable solutions, and elevates the team through strong technical leadership.

This is not a typical engineering role. Your work could look something like:

• 50% – Building sophisticated systems, features, and algorithms (creator-brand matching, recommendation engines, analytics pipelines, real-time collaboration), improving and extending existing features
• 25% – Platform evolution (scaling architecture, monitoring, potential containerization and platform migrations)
• 25% – Technical co-leadership (architectural decisions, guiding engineers when needed)
• …and then an extra 50% spent dreaming up the future, inventing, prototyping, spotting the fires no one sees yet, and quietly solving them before anyone panics

• Own the lifecycle of sophisticated features: problem framing, prototype, launch, and post-launch iteration.
• Partner with product to set success metrics for matching, recommendations, and creator-brand search quality.

• Design and implement horizontal scaling strategies for services as we grow from thousands to millions of requests
• Optimize infrastructure performance and evaluate data architecture decisions
• Own monitoring, observability, and incident response infrastructure
• Containerize our applications for better resource management and deployment velocity

• Collaborate with product and engineering leaders to guide the team through code reviews, architectural decisions, and quality control
• Make high-leverage decisions: when to extract microservices, when to refactor vs. rebuild, and when “good enough” is actually right
• Champion engineering best practices while understanding startup trade-offs - we ship fast, but we ship with quality
• Bridge between product/design vision and technical execution - take a rough direction or half-formed idea from product/eng leadership and turn it into a sharp, well-scoped spec the team can build against
• Translate the “why” into the “what” and “how”: pressure-test the vision, surface the edge cases and trade-offs early, and write specs that are clear enough that the right solution becomes obvious

• Frontend: Next.js, Type Script, MUI, Tan Stack Query
• Key integrations: Shopify, Stripe, Autumn, Algolia, Phyllo, Cloudinary, TalkJS, Live blocks, Knock, Send Grid, Datadog
• AI: OpenAI/Anthropic APIs

• 4-5+ years of software engineering experience
• Strong…