Senior Software Engineer — TypeScript & Node · Distributed Messaging (Kafka / RabbitMQ) · AI Coding Agents

“Roads? Where we’re going, we don’t need roads.”

• Doc Brown, Back to the Future

Senior Software Engineer - TypeScript & Node, Distributed Messaging (Kafka / RabbitMQ) and AI Coding Agents.

Remote, USA (Pacific overlap preferred). Up to $230k + equity. Full-time.

US citizens and Green Card holders only - no sponsorship or visa transfers of any kind.

READ THIS BIT FIRST

Three things decide whether this role is for you. Everything below is detail.

1. Deep TypeScript and Node. Expert level, not exposure. Modern service frameworks, a monorepo setup, React on the front end, cloud-native infrastructure. If TypeScript has been incidental to a Java or Python career, this is not your role.
2. Real distributed messaging
   • Kafka, RabbitMQ or equivalent. This is the single most common reason strong resumes get rejected here. Event-driven systems, queueing and streaming, ordering, idempotency, retries, and what happens when a consumer falls over at volume. Calling REST APIs is not this.
3. Shipping production code with AI coding agents. Hands-on, in a real codebase, right now. You should have opinions about what you delegate to an agent, what you never would, and how you review what comes back. Theory and weekend experiments will not clear the bar.

Miss one of the three and the conversation stops there. Have all three and you are already most of the way into a process with a company paying well above market for engineers who do this properly.

THE COMPANY

A venture-backed B2B software company of roughly 100 people, rebuilding the data layer that moves orders, invoices and shipment data between the companies that actually make and ship things. It is a category that has run on decades-old tooling, manual configuration and months-long onboarding since roughly the fax era. This team turned it into a self-service platform with AI built into the core of the product, and hundreds of enterprise customers now push serious production volume through it daily.

Boring-sounding industry. Enormous, sticky market. Genuinely interesting engineering.

WHY THIS ONE IS DIFFERENT

Most companies will tell you they are AI-forward. Usually that means someone expensed a licence and the team is encouraged to experiment.

Here, coding agents are standard equipment - simply how the work gets done. Which means the senior engineering job has quietly turned into something more interesting than it was three years ago. You are not the fastest typist on the team. You are the person who decides what is worth building, designs the system it lives in, directs the agents doing the construction, and reviews their output with exactly the scepticism you would bring to a teammate’s pull request.

And here is what gets missed in every breathless post about AI replacing engineers: this makes deep fundamentals more valuable, not less. You cannot safely approve what an agent produces if you do not genuinely understand the system underneath it. An agent will happily hand you something that compiles, passes tests, and quietly falls apart the first time real volume hits it at 3am. Catching that is the job.

WHAT YOU WILL ACTUALLY BE DOING

Designing the hard parts. You lead the technical design of major initiatives and product features. You write the design docs. You make the call on architecture and you argue it in business terms, not just technical ones.

Directing and reviewing AI agents. Decomposing work so agents can execute it well, steering that execution, and reviewing it rigorously. You set the standard for what an agent is and is not allowed to ship.

Living in distributed systems. The platform is event-driven, moving high volumes of transactional data between parties who all have opinions about format and timing.

Owning reliability. Enterprise customers’ supply chains depend on what you build. You own how it behaves under load and when things break.

Raising the bar. Mentoring other engineers and lifting their design skills.

Partnering with product. Pushing back when the engineering cost does not justify the outcome, and proposing the better route to the same result.

WHAT THIS ROLE IS NOT

Not a management role. No reports, no headcount, no review cycles. If you went into management and came back to IC because building is what you love, that reads as excellent judgement here.

Not execution inside someone else’s architecture. If the last few years were delivering well-specified work within a design someo…