Founding Engineer

About the RoleShava Studios is building AI-native software products. We are hiring a Mid Senior Full-Stack Engineer to own features end-to-end across the frontend and backend, with depth in system architecture and the AI and real-time systems that connect them. We hire for demonstrated ability rather than years of experience.Technical EnvironmentFrontend: Next.js (App Router), React, TypeScript, Tailwind CSS, MUI, Radix UI, TanStack Query, Zustand, NextAuth; Remotion for in-browser video editing and rendering.Backend: Python, FastAPI, SQLAlchemy with PostgreSQL and Alembic, Pydantic; hexagonal (ports-and-adapters) microservices.Async & Real-Time: Celery with RabbitMQ, Redis and Redis Streams, server-sent events, and WebSockets.AI: LangGraph, deepagents, and LangChain for agent orchestration across multiple GenAI providers (OpenAI, Google, and others).Tooling & Quality: Vitest, Playwright, Testing Library, pytest, Hypothesis; ruff and mypy; TDD with a strict line-and-branch coverage gate; Docker; CI on Azure Pipelines.ResponsibilitiesDesign, build, and ship full-stack features end-to-end across the UI, backend services, and async job pipelines.Design and evolve service APIs, data models, and database schemas with migrations.Architect and integrate LLM/agent and other AI capabilities behind clean, provider-agnostic abstractions.Build and harden real-time systems (WebSockets, server-sent events, streaming) with reliable delivery and reconnection semantics.Design asynchronous processing pipelines: queuing, workers, retries, idempotency, and failure recovery.Manage third-party integrations (payments, AI providers, storage) behind well-defined interfaces.Optimize frontend and backend performance, state management, and scalability.Own security-sensitive concerns: authentication, authorization, secret handling, and secure service-to-service communication.Instrument observability: logging, metrics, tracing, and structured error handling.Uphold and evolve the architecture and engineering standards through technical design and code review.Mentor engineers and raise the quality bar across the team.RequirementsProven full-stack delivery across a React/TypeScript frontend and a Python (or comparable) backend.Sound judgment on architecture, API design, and data modeling, with the ability to articulate trade-offs.Rigorous testing discipline and comfort with TDD and high coverage standards.Ability to work with LLM/GenAI systems; direct experience preferred, though strong engineers eager to learn are welcome.Technical leadership: thoughtful code review, clear technical writing, and a focus on root-cause fixes.Nice to HaveProduction experience with LLM/agent systems (LangGraph, LangChain, or similar).Media or video pipelines: encoding, timeline editors, or serverless rendering.Async worker systems (Celery, RabbitMQ, Redis).Payments/billing and metering systems under concurrency.Hexagonal architecture, ports-and-adapters, or DDD experience.GrowthThe role offers substantial influence over architecture and a clear path toward staff-level technical leadership for engineers who raise the team's standards.