Senior Software Engineer

Melon Local — Salt Lake City, UT or Las Vegas, NV (Remote)

Base $130,000–$160,000 DOE
Full benefits Reports to Software Engineering Manager

We’re hiring a Senior Software Engineer for a specific shape of seat: an AI-augmented individual contributor (IC) who directs AI tooling as their primary implementation method.

Your day-to-day looks like this. You envision complex full-stack implementations end-to-end across our system, then drive your AI tooling to write the code you’ve already worked out in your head. You validate AI output for correctness, refactor as needed, and ship.

Coding throughput comes from AI.
Architectural judgment, code review, and the ability to spot what’s wrong with a 200-line pull request (PR) come from you.

You must already understand what good .NET code looks like at every layer — the work depends on you being able to validate what AI produces. You won’t be typing most of the code, but you’ll be reading and reviewing all of it.

• Envision and architect features across our interconnected system:
  Azure Functions, two Web APIs, an ASP.NET MVC web app, and a customer-facing React app served by a .NET Backend-for-Frontend (BFF) that calls those same Web APIs.
• Direct AI tooling as your primary implementation method. Spend more time directing the AI than typing code yourself — but bring the deep mental model that lets you direct it well.
• Make architectural decisions about cross-system integration: what contracts the Web APIs expose, how the BFF aggregates, what belongs in Azure Functions versus the Web APIs versus the MVC app.
• Debug across the full stack. When something breaks, trace it from the React UI through the BFF, through the Web APIs, into SQL Server.
• Validate code in reviews — primarily reviewing AI-produced and AI-augmented code from yourself and peers, looking for subtle issues, architectural drift, or pattern violations.
• Contribute to architecture conversations and code reviews as one engineer among peers, not as a tech lead directing them.
• Treat AI coding tools as your daily power tool, not a curiosity.

We’ve seen excellent engineers self-select out at this stage and appreciate the honesty. If any of the below describes you, this isn’t your seat — but feel free to share your background. We may have a different fit now or in the future.

• You don’t currently use AI development tools daily, or you’d rather write every line of code yourself.
• Your last six months have been mostly managing engineers, defining strategy, or doing architecture/standards work without recent active implementation.
• You can’t comfortably read a 200-line .NET PR and identify what’s wrong with it. This role is heavy on reviewing AI-produced code.
• You’re looking for a Staff or Principal architect role where you direct other engineers’ work rather than implement features yourself.
• You haven’t worked across multiple related .NET projects (APIs, MVC web apps, serverless functions, BFFs). This role is heavily about cross-system thinking.
• You’re skeptical that AI-augmented development is where professional engineering is moving. We’re committed to this workflow, and we want someone enthusiastic about it.

You must already have this. You’ll be validating AI output against your own mental model, not Googling fundamentals.

• 5+ years of professional .NET engineering experience, including hands-on work in the last 12 months.
• Deep understanding of C#, .NET Core/.NET 8+, ASP.NET MVC, Web APIs, and Razor. You can write any of this from scratch if needed — you just won’t be typing most of it day-to-day.
• Working knowledge of Entity Framework Core: dependency injection of DbContext, LINQ queries, migrations, and EF performance patterns. You can explain how a DbContext is registered and consumed without looking it up.
• SQL Server competency. Write queries, understand indexing, read execution plans, identify N+1 problems.
• React experience for our customer-facing app side.
• Comfort with Azure Functions or similar serverless patterns.
• Architectural intuition across multiple related services. You can look at a feature spec and immediately see which of…