Senior Software Engineer, Full Stack, HQ

Playon is looking for a Senior Full Stack Engineer who can own outcomes end-to-end across our HQ web application and the services it depends on. The HQ team builds the core administrative and operational experiences that support schools, partners, and internal teams across our ecosystem. Today, features can stall at the seams between frontend and backend, and contractor output needs strong technical leadership to meet our standards. This role helps collapse those seams by combining strong product-facing UI delivery with pragmatic API and service ownership.
You’ll help unify and strengthen HQ and the services behind it—building across a React-based frontend and a polyglot backend spanning Java, Go, and TypeScript/GraphQL with PostgreSQL—while improving how we deploy, scale, and operate on EKS with GitOps
As a Senior Full Stack Engineer, you’ll build high-impact React surfaces and shape the underlying APIs and event-driven flows that power them. You’ll also help provide day-to-day technical direction and integration guidance for our FE/BE contractor pods to ensure quality and speed.
The outcomes you’ll deliver:
-High-quality HQ web experiences: Build scalable, maintainable React features and patterns that improve user experience and reduce cycle time.-Cohesive UI + API designs: Turn product requirements into clear full-stack solutions with durable contracts and fewer integration surprises.-Event-driven maturity: Strengthen cross-domain integrations using Kafka and reliable data fan-out patterns that support HQ workflows.-Operational excellence: Ensure key services and flows are observable, resilient, and production-ready with meaningful dashboards, alerts, and reliability practices.-Platform evolution: Help harden domain services and reduce unnecessary coupling to monolith surfaces without slowing product delivery.-Team and contractor leverage: Establish patterns for component library usage, API contracts, test automation (e2e + contract tests), and delivery hygiene that other engineers and contractors can follow. In this role, you can expect to

• Design and ship React + TypeScript features that power HQ’s most important user-facing workflows.
• Collaborate with product and design to turn requirements into cohesive UI architecture, reusable components, and predictable delivery.
• Design and implement APIs—primarily in Java/Spring Boot—that support the HQ web experience, with a focus on stability, versioning, and good developer ergonomics.
• Work comfortably across services in Java and collaborate with teams or codebases in Go, TypeScript, and Python as needed.
• Build and evolve event-driven workflows with reliable publishing/consumption patterns and thoughtful schema discipline.
• Apply strong database fundamentals with PostgreSQL, including data modeling, query performance awareness, and safe migration practices.
• Strengthen CI/CD and deployment safety using AWS, EKS, and a GitOps approach.
• Improve quality with a balanced test strategy across UI, API, integration, and contract/e2e layers.
• Mentor engineers and provide high-signal code review and technical direction for contractors.

To thrive in this role, you have

• 5–8 years of professional software engineering experience, including shipping full-stack web features at scale.
• Strong, production experience with React + TypeScript, including building maintainable UI architecture and reusable component patterns.
• Strong skills in Java (Spring Boot) and experience designing and implementing APIs.
• Solid experience with PostgreSQL or other relational databases.
• Experience with event-driven architecture and data fan-out technologies like Kafka.
• Strong familiarity with AWS and cloud-native practices, especially EKS.
• Experience with CI/CD and comfort with GitOps-style delivery.
• A practical understanding of observability, monitoring, alerting, and incident response.
• Confidence guiding mixed teams (FTE + contractors) with clear specs, reference patterns, and consistent review standards.
• Golang experience is a plus, along with familiarity with Python services.

HOW YOU PLAY

• **Ownership over Participation-**You take responsibility for achieving holistic outcomes, prioritize key objectives, and adapt quickly when situations require a different approach. You follow through even against the toughest challenges.

• **Team over Stars-**You are a bridge builder, establishing processes and relationships with teams outside your own. You work to rally around common goals, find win-win solutions, compromise when necessary, and help others succeed.

• **Growth over Comfort-**You are driven by a desire to grow and actively seek opportunities to expand your comfort zone, skills, and confidence. You embrace new challenges with curiosity, accepting discomfort and failure as opportunities to learn.

• **Fairness over Popularity-**You approach decisions with a scientist’s mindset, challenging your assumptions and remaining objective. You consider long-term impact rather than relying on short-term gains, proactively seek others’ perspectives, and manage emotions in decision-making.