Staff Software Engineer, Core

Staff Software Engineer, Color Cloud

The Staff Software Engineer on the Core team is a unique and vital role within Madison Reed, owning the foundational platform that nearly every other system at the company is built on. This role owns the backend services, APIs, data models, and integrations that power the entire business. It involves architecting and leading the development of the systems other teams depend on, driving technical strategy for the platform, and contributing to the organization’s long-term architectural vision. Working in a cross-functional, agile ai-first environment, the engineer collaborates with teammates, product owners, and stakeholders across every line of business, while mentoring engineers at all levels and fostering a culture of innovation, collaboration, and excellence.

We expect our Staff Software Engineer to both build and use the AI capabilities and infrastructure that other teams build on top of, and to have fundamentally changed how they build by working alongside frontier agentic coding tools, while retaining the deep technical ownership required to audit, verify, and own everything that ships

The base range for this contract position is between 170,000 and 175,000. At Madison Reed, we aim to pay competitively. Factors which may affect starting pay within this range may include geography/market, skills, education, experience, and other qualifications of the successful candidate. This role must be based in the United States.

What You'll Do

• Own the core platform end-to-end. Architect, build, and ship the services, APIs, and data models at the heart of Madison Reed, making foundational decisions that every other team depends on.
• Drive platform technical strategy. Identify opportunities for innovation and lead the adoption of new technologies, tools, and patterns. Set the standards and contracts that keep a multi-team, multi-domain platform coherent as it scales.
• Build the AI foundation for the company. Stand up the infrastructure, services, and patterns that let every team integrate LLMs and agents safely, and bring AI capabilities directly into core business workflows.
• Engineer for scale, reliability, and security. Treat performance, observability, data integrity, and secure coding as first-class concerns. Design systems that are resilient, debuggable, and safe by default.
• Own the contracts other teams build on. Design clean, well-versioned APIs and integrations; anticipate how downstream teams will use them; and treat backward compatibility and developer experience as part of the product.
• Own reliability in the wild. Treat CI/CD, monitoring, and incident response as a fundamental part of the job, not an afterthought. Set a high bar through observability, error tracking, and optimization across the systems the whole business runs on.
• Take ownership of large, ambiguous initiatives and break them into actionable workstreams across multiple teams. Lead efforts to refactor and optimize large areas of the codebase, ensuring alignment with business goals and long-term scalability.
• Mentor and raise the bar. Establish patterns for code reuse, elevate the engineers around you through rigorous code review and testing practices, and foster a culture of technical excellence and knowledge sharing.
• Collaborate with product and leadership across every line of business to align technical solutions with business priorities, shaping both what gets built and how it gets built.

What We're Looking For

• 8+ years of professional software engineering experience, with deep expertise building production backend systems in JavaScript/TypeScript (Node.js) and the surrounding service ecosystem.
• A proven track record of designing, shipping, and maintaining complex, data-heavy, high-throughput platforms in production at scale.
• Platform and systems architecture mastery. You design APIs, data models, and service boundaries that hold up as multiple teams build on them, and you reason fluently about scalability, consistency, and failure modes.
• Secure and reliable by default. Deep understanding of secure coding practices, data integrity, performance optimization, and the observability and debugging tools needed to operate critical systems in production.
• Full lifecycle ownership. You build things that run reliably in production, not just pass review, owning the CI/CD pipeline, error rates, and your services’ behavior under real-world load.
• Your workflow has been altered by AI. You are already using frontier agentic coding tools (e.g. Claude Code, Codex, Cursor) to build faster, and can describe specific ways they have structurally changed how you work, while retaining the technical curiosity and ownership  to audit, verify, and fully own their output.
• Demonstrated technical leadership. A track record of setting technical direction across teams, designing scalable and maintainable architecture, and measurably leveling up the engineers around you.
• A high-ownership mindset with a bias toward action, comfort operating in ambiguity, and the ability to balance technical and business considerations in complex, high-pressure situations.
• Experience building or operating the AI/LLM infrastructure that other engineering teams build on (agent frameworks, eval pipelines, retrieval/RAG, prompt and tool-call tooling).
• Exceptional communication and collaboration skills, with low ego and high standards.

Bonus Points

• • • Background in e-commerce, subscriptions/memberships, payments, fulfillment, or order management systems.
    • Experience decomposing a monolith, or evolving a core platform that many teams depend on, without breaking them.
    • Experience with event-driven architectures, data pipelines, or third-party systems integration.
    • Open-source contributions, or platforms you’ve built and shipped yourself.

Big on Benefits 

The Perks? Glad you asked…

• Comprehensive Healthcare
• 100% Company Paid Short and Long Term Disability 
• 401k Participation and Equity Grants
• Continuing Education Contributions
• HSA Employer Contributions and FSA Options
• Parental Leave Program
• Commuter Benefits
• Responsible Paid Time Off Program
• Complimentary Madison Reed Products + Discounts on Hair Color Bar Services
• Company sponsored events
• But wait, there’s more…

We are Madison Reed.

We’re disrupting a $50 billion industry.

Since 2013, we’ve offered our clients the option to truly own their beauty with a revolutionary choice—your place or ours? Home or Hair Color Bar? Our professional hair color is truly omnichannel, with the option to order or subscribe through our website, pick up in-store at our Hair Color Bars, or make an appointment at one of our Hair Color Bar locations (over 20 & growing). At our Hair Color Bars, clients can choose from a variety of color services from licensed cosmetologists—permanent hair color, roots only, hair gloss, highlights and more. With our men’s line launched in 2020, we’re shaking up the $50 billion hair care industry with products that continue to raise the bar for doing hair at home.

We live our values.

Here at our San Francisco headquarters and in every Hair Color Bar, we truly live our values—Love, Joy, Courage, Responsibility, and Trust. Our values inform everything we do, from how we treat our clients to how we treat every member of our fast-growing team. Our founder & CEO, Amy Errett, has fostered a one-of-a-kind culture based on transparency, accountability, and fun; where diversity and inclusion are of utmost importance and every team member feels supported to succeed.

We are hair color that breaks the rules.

Our commitment to the ultimate client experience, paired with our dedication to product innovation and the latest beauty technology, has attracted a devoted, consistently-growing base of fans, converts, and color evangelists. We love what we do—and it shows.

Join us in our mission to live life colorfully and make personal care more personal.

Information for Recruiters: Madison Reed only accepts resumes directly from candidates. Madison Reed does not accept unsolicited resumes from staffing vendors, including recruitment agencies and/or search firms, and does not pay fees to any such vendors for any unsolicited resumes.

Madison Reed. is an equal opportunity employer. We are committed to recruiting, training, compensating and promoting our employees regardless of race, color, religion, sex, disability, national origin, age, sexual orientation, gender or any other protected classes as required by applicable law that might make us unique or different. As a company, we are dedicated to reflecting the diversity, multiculturalism, and inclusion found in the communities we serve. Inclusion is at the heart of what we do, from the way we craft our job descriptions, to the values we espouse daily.