Staff Engineer, Full Stack (San Francisco)

The Role:

As one of the earliest engineers at Short Story, this is a high-impact opportunity to shape our technology, product experience, and engineering culture. You’ll work end-to-end across both customer-facing and internal platforms, building the tools our customers and stylists rely on every day. From designing resilient backend services to scaling design systems and refining order flows, you’ll play a central role in how we deliver style and customer happiness at scale.

At this stage of our company, a Staff Engineer isn’t just a strong coder — you’re a technical leader, problem solver, and multiplier. You’ll collaborate closely with designers, PMs, and operators, but also look around corners: identifying bottlenecks, shaping architectural decisions, and driving the engineering culture that will set us up for the next chapter of growth.

What You'll Do:

• Design, build, and scale full-stack applications with technologies like Next.js, React Query, TailwindCSS, Node.js, and PostgreSQL.
• Drive technical direction : influence architecture, make trade-offs, and establish engineering standards that balance speed and scalability.
• Collaborate cross-functionally with design, product, and operations to deliver solutions end-to-end, from UI to backend services.
• Translate Figma designs into seamless, interactive experiences while ensuring backend integrations are robust and performant.
• Use data to drive impact : A/B test, instrument, and iterate to improve user experience and business outcomes.
• Multiply team effectiveness : mentor engineers, lead design reviews, and raise the technical bar.
• Ensure quality and reliability : drive testing and automation across the stack (Cypress, Jest, React Testing Library, integration tests).
• Own deployment and operations : manage apps on Netlify, AWS, or equivalent, and build CI/CD pipelines with GitHub Actions.
• Champion engineering culture : set standards around performance, security, accessibility, and technical excellence.

Must Haves:

• You are passionate about improving the user experience and have built and launched high-quality user-facing products.
• You’re fluent in TypeScript and CSS, and have extensive experience building scalable applications using NextJS and ReactJS
• You have hands-on experience with React-Query, Tailwind CSS, and front-end tooling like Webpack and Yarn
• You’ve worked in collaborative development environments using Git and GitHub
• You’ve translated designs from Figma into elegant and accessible interfaces across multiple devices and browsers
• You are able to establish testing practices and methodologies for the team
• You understand how to optimize front-end performance and build for scalability
• You’re thoughtful about documentation, communication, and team enablement
• You thrive in fast-paced, ambiguous environments where you can own solutions end-to-end
• You’re excited by ambiguity and love solving complex problems from end to end

Nice to Haves:

• You have 5+ years of experience in professional front-end development
• Experience working in a fast-moving startup environment
• Experience integrating/building component systems and libraries for large codebases
• Have experience with server-side rendering (SSR) and static site generation (SSG)
• Have worked on sprint-based teams using OKRs or similar frameworks
• Have experience working remotely with global teams
• Have led or built a front-end engineering team before
• Have contributed to open-source or have a strong portfolio of personal project

Location:

• We are hiring in San Francisco
• Work in-office in Potrero, San Francisco

Compensation and Benefits:

• Comprehensive health, vision, and dental care
• 401k with company match (US)
• Generous paid time off
• Opportunity to work at a Y-Combinator backed startup alongside a dedicated and experienced founding team
• Company wide and team events

Why You'll Love Working at Short Story:

• You'll get to work at an early stage start-up, to build the culture, and to have an outsized impact on our company and society
• You'll be a key part of the company with the ability to make high impact decisions
• You'll get the opportunity to try your hand at new things. We deeply believe in giving people opportunity to venture into new areas
• We are a successful, fast-growing startup solving problems that have not been solved before and reinventing fashion for an underserved segment
• We are a group of smart, passionate hackers with a wealth of diverse experiences
• We are motivated by unique challenges and opportunities
• We are driven by the mission of helping petite women find their perfect fit so they can dress with total confidence

Short Story is committed to providing equal employment opportunity and a work environment free of discrimination and harassment for all employees and applicants. We work diligently to ensure equal opportunity for all applicants and employees without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability, age, Veteran status, or other legally protected characteristics.

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