Senior AI-First Software Engineer; PHP​/React Remote

Charleston, SC preferred
· East Coast (US) required

Sam Cart builds, runs, and scales your online business. Where most platforms hand creators more work — more pages to build, more tech to figure out — our platform does the work for them, leveraging AI to guide them through best practices and strategies we have seen across thousands of creators.

That’s not just how our product works. It’s how we work. Sam Cart operates on an AI-first model — Claude is embedded into how we plan, build, and ship across every team, from initiative scoping to release documentation. This isn’t a pilot. It’s how we run the business today.

We believe our customers’ success is our success — and we take that seriously. It’s how we think about our customers, and it’s how we think about our people.

Writing the code is no longer the hard part of this job. The engineering is.

AI writes most of the code at Sam Cart, and Claude Code is standard-issue here. Engineers spend their days deciding what gets built, directing agents to build it, judging whether what came back is actually right, and owning the result in production. The discernment is the expensive part: knowing where Claude's output won't hold up in our system, and saying so.

This is a deep engineering role first, but you'll sit closer to product than you might elsewhere. You'll partner with our Product Managers early — pushing on scope, flagging what's expensive, helping decide what's worth building — then own getting it shipped. What you won't get is a finished spec handed over the wall.

We're a startup and we operate lean, so you'll work directly with our engineering leads, product managers, and executive leadership. Broad ownership, real consequences, and a strong bias toward execution.

• Take a problem from a loose brief to shipped and stable. You own the design, the review, and the outcome, with AI doing the majority of the coding.
• Make architecture calls in a mature PHP codebase and a React/Next.js front end — where to extend, where to refactor, and where to leave well enough alone.
• Review AI output the way a senior engineer reviews a junior's PR: fast, skeptical, and specific. Catching where the model is confidently wrong is core to the job.
• Own your work in production. You ship it, you watch it, you fix it.
• Improve how the team builds — the AI workflows, our MCP tooling, and the tests that make agent-written code safe to merge.

• 6+ years building and shipping production web applications, several of them at a senior level.
• Deep expertise in at least one domain or system. You've been the person others came to, and you can explain the tradeoffs behind how it was built.
• Architecture-capable, execution-biased. You can whiteboard the right long-term system, then ship the pragmatic version now and explain the tradeoff you made.
• AI-native. You use Claude daily like a teammate, and you're just as comfortable catching where it's wrong.
• You raise the bar around you through mentoring, teaching, and improving how the whole team builds.
• Full-stack, and comfortable in someone else's codebase. Real systems have history. You can tell what's merely ugly from what's actually wrong.
• Located on the East Coast (US), ideally in or near Charleston, SC.

Strongly Preferred: PHP/Laravel and React/Type Script, AWS, e-commerce or payments experience, hands-on work with agent or MCP tooling, or time as one of the first engineers at a startup.

A PHP/Laravel monolith, a React/Next.js front end, AWS, Datadog, Linear, Git Hub, and Claude Code throughout. We also run a public MCP server so our customers' AI agents can work with their Sam Cart data.

The work itself is remote, and the whole company gets together in…