Lead Full Stack Engineer

Lead Full Stack Engineer

Genies is seeking a contract Lead Full Stack Engineer to guide the technical direction, architecture, and execution of our avatar-driven digital products. You'll be a player-coach — leading by example as a hands-on contributor while mentoring a team of talented engineers. Reporting directly to the Director of Software Engineering and Infrastructure, you'll drive technical excellence, champion engineering best practices, and ensure scalable, performant solutions across the stack.

This is a high-impact role for an engineer who thrives on mentorship, system design, and building cohesive teams that ship complex, user-facing systems at the intersection of AI, game technology, and UGC creation tools. We move fast at Genies, and we expect our lead engineers to move fast with us — leveraging AI as a force multiplier while holding the bar on quality, clarity, and correctness.

Technical Leadership — Define and own the architectural vision and implementation strategy for full-stack systems supporting Genies' Smart Avatar ecosystem. Establish technical standards, patterns, and scalable frameworks across both frontend and backend. Make opinionated choices on separation of concerns and push back on over engineering.

AI-Augmented Development — Actively integrate AI tools into your development workflow for planning, code generation, debugging, and testing. Critically evaluate AI-generated output — catching complexity, duplication, or architectural drift before it takes root. Beyond your own practice, you'll champion AI adoption across the team: identifying opportunities where AI can reduce toil, accelerate delivery, and raise the quality bar. You'll share workflows, prompt strategies, and tooling discoveries that make the whole team faster — not just yourself.

Hands-on Contribution — Contribute directly to the codebase with a focus on maintainability, reliability, and performance. Build intuitive, interactive user interfaces to a high frontend standard while also delivering robust APIs and backend services using technologies such as React, Next.js, Type Script, Node.js, and Go.

Mentorship & Team Development — Act as a player-coach for a growing team. Provide structured mentorship, code review guidance, and ongoing feedback that fosters career growth and engineering excellence.

Cross-Functional Collaboration — Partner closely with product managers, designers, and other engineering teams to translate high-level goals into technical deliverables. Ask sharp questions during requirements gathering and translate ambiguity into clear implementation plans.

Strategic Impact — Drive initiatives that improve developer velocity, operational efficiency, and code quality. Proactively identify technical risks, scalability challenges, and long-term architectural needs — including tradeoffs in distributed systems, CAP theorem considerations, and service design.

Process & Culture Building — Champion best practices in code quality, security (OWASP Top Ten, OAuth 2.0), testing (TDD/automation coverage), and observability (alerting and monitoring). Help shape a culture of learning, accountability, and high ownership.

• 7+ years of professional full stack development experience, including at least 2 years in a technical leadership or mentorship role

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, a related field, or equivalent practical experience

• Proven ability to design and scale distributed, high-performance web applications

• Expertise with modern web technologies:
  React, Type Script/JavaScript (ES6+), Node.js, Next.js

• Strong frontend sensibility — you care about usability, design patterns, and the details that make an interface feel right

• Strong backend development experience with Go, Python, or similar languages

• Fluency with No
  
  SQL and relational database solutions

• Experience building and consuming RESTful and GraphQL APIs; familiarity with event-driven architectures

• Understanding of data pipelines and ETL patterns

• Solid grasp of security fundamentals: OWASP Top Ten, OAuth 2.0

• Experience with cloud infrastructure (AWS) and CI/CD pipelines

• Demonstrated AI workflow maturity — you use AI tools to…