For 20 years, Ladders has connected ambitious professionals with $100K+ opportunities, now serving over 8 million members. We're a profitable, small, collaborative, venture-backed team in NYC that moves fast, ships real products, and applies AI in ways that genuinely help people land better careers.
We're looking for a thoughtful Senior Full-Stack Engineer(6+ years experience) who thrives owning problems end-to-end. You'll design and build AI-powered features that reach millions of job seekers, make pragmatic architectural decisions, and balance speed with long-term quality. This is not a backlog-ticket role, we want someone who takes a concept all the way to production, not just executes what's handed to them.
This is a NY based role with regular in-office presence required (hybrid schedule).
Design and build AI-powered products and features that deliver meaningful user impact
Build and maintain scalable backend services and user-facing applications
Collaborate closely with product and design team, and other engineering teams to deliver high-impact features
Make structural technical decisions and clearly articulate trade-offs when solving complex problems
6+ years of professional software engineering experience
Strong foundation in programming and software design principles
Proven experience building well-scoped, performant modern web applications
Production experience with React or Next.js and at least one of the following languages: Go, Python, or JavaScript
Comfort navigating the full stack and pulling in what's needed to ship
Strong ownership mindset and ability to work effectively within cross-functional teams
Experience working with AI tools, prompt engineering, or integrating AI into development workflows
Search infrastructure experience (Elasticsearch or similar)
Familiarity with message brokers (e.g., Kafka, RabbitMQ, AWS SQS)
Database optimization experience (e.g., MariaDB or similar relational databases)
Consistently delivers product features with high quality and strong attention to detail
Uses AI-assisted development fluently, producing clean and maintainable code at higher velocity
Builds strong partnerships with engineers, product and design, contributing to team and organizational growth
We know that great candidates don’t always check every box. If you’re excited about this role, we strongly encourage you to apply, even if you don’t meet every listed qualification.
The products we’re building have meaningful social impact, and we believe that diverse experiences and viewpoints make that work stronger. We’re committed to building an inclusive team and would love to hear from you.
We lead the leaders. Ladder’s community of 10 mm leading professionals come to us to be inspired, grow in their careers, and get ahead in their professional lives. We focus on the $100K+ job market, representing 25% of all jobs and about 50% of income in the US & Canada. We build data-driven tools, marketplaces, news and entertainment products for our growing audience, and the companies, recruiters, and advertisers that want to reach them.
We work best with people who enjoy using their talents, commitment and hard work to achieve great successes for millions of real life users through products that impact their careers. We are deeply technology-driven -- about half the company are engineers, technical product people or product designers -- but we never build technology for technology’s sake. We’re always trying to connect our efforts to the good it can do in people’s lives.
