Senior Software Engineer

Overview

Location:

Irvine, CA (Full-Time). Compensation:
Competitive, based on your ability to ship and lead. The Reality of This Role:
We aren't looking for a "resource" to fill a seat; we’re looking for a lead-caliber engineer who thrives when the training wheels are off. At Kingsmen, we don't have a massive layer of project managers to shield you or a library of pre-written tickets to follow.

You’ll be expected to take a vague client problem, design the architecture, and write the code that solves it. We need the person people turn to when a race condition is eating data or when a system needs to scale without falling over. If you prefer narrow scopes and "safe" environments, this isn't the right fit. If you like having total ownership over your work, we should talk.

You’ll own projects from the first whiteboard session to the final production deploy. This involves:

• Navigating Ambiguity: Turning messy client requirements into clean, functional technical designs.
• Building for Keeps: Implementing the "hard stuff" correctly the first time—concurrency control, idempotency, and strict data integrity.
• Architectural Balance: Knowing when to build for the long haul and when to ship a pragmatic solution to move the needle.
• Production Responsibility: Shipping software that actually works in the wild, not just on your local machine.

You’ll split your time between our core event-driven platform and fast-moving client builds where execution speed is the priority.

To us, seniority isn’t a tally of years—it's a level of judgment. We know you’re ready for this if:

• You can run a project end-to-end without someone looking over your shoulder.
• You can explain why you made a specific technical tradeoff and defend it.
• You spot failure modes (like deadlocks or API rate limits) before they happen.
• Your code is clear enough that the next engineer doesn’t have to call you to understand it.
• You’ve felt the weight of being accountable for a live production system.

We expect deep, "under the hood" comfort with our stack. You don't need to be an expert in every single library, but you should understand the fundamentals:

• Backend: Node.js / NestJS and Type Script (used for domain modeling, not just "any" types).
• Database: Postgres (you should understand locking, migrations, and how to optimize a query).
• Architecture: Experience with Microservices, Event-Driven design, and Distributed Systems (you should know the difference between at-least-once and exactly-once delivery).
• Dev Ops: Docker and containerized workflows are part of the daily routine.
• Testing: Writing tests that actually reduce risk, rather than just chasing 100% coverage numbers.

We are a long-term partner to our clients, not a "feature factory." This means we care about the quality of what we build because we’re the ones who have to maintain it.

• Autonomy: We hire experts and then stay out of their way.
• Investment: We provide a dedicated learning budget, flexible hours, and a culture that respects your time (no burnout-by-design).
• Benefits: Full health/dental/vision, retirement matching, and unlimited PTO.
• Longevity: You’ll see your architectural decisions play out over years, giving you a feedback loop that internal "greenfield-only" roles lack.

This isn’t for you if: You want a roadmap handed to you, you avoid ownership when things get complicated, or you’ve only ever worked on internal tools with no real users.

This is for you if: You want to be the engineer who defines how we build things, not just someone who closes tickets.