Senior Full Stack Software Engineer

Senior Full Stack Engineer

Samba TV is a media intelligence company. We use consented, large-scale viewership and consumer data to help the biggest brands in the world make smarter decisions about how they reach and understand their audiences.

We're building a new AI-powered product with a real-time, conversational interface. Users interact with a system that researches, reasons, and produces real deliverables — interactive charts and data views, structured outputs, and downloadable documents — as it works. It's a modern, AI-native, type-safe codebase, and the product operates at global scale.

We're looking for a Senior Full Stack Engineer to join our engineering team in San Francisco. This is a genuinely full-stack role that spans the whole request path: an AI/agent backend, the Node/TypeScript service layer that fronts it, and the React streaming UI on top. You'll work across all of it and be one of the people the team leans on for architectural direction. You'll also be able to lead front-end work when the team needs coverage — but the front end is one facet of the job, not its center.

What You'll Do

• Design across the whole system. Make and document the architectural calls that span the AI/backend engine, the service layer, and the UI — orchestration boundaries, streaming protocols, the type-safe client-to-server contract, artifact and file-delivery flows, persistence, and error/reconnection strategy. Turn ambiguous product goals into designs the team can build against.

• Build on the backend and AI layer. Work in the engine that powers the product — extending backend services and their capabilities, wiring model interactions and structured outputs, handling streaming, and managing state and persistence. Reason about latency, cost, and failure modes across the system.

• Own the service layer. Extend the Node backend-for-frontend between the UI and core services — building endpoints, streaming responses (SSE) to the browser, enforcing auth, and keeping the client-to-server contract type-safe end to end.

• Ship UI, and provide front-end coverage. Build a streaming, chat-style interface in React on a modern SSR framework — live token streams, progress indicators, and inline interactive content — and turn structured data into interactive charts, tables, and the download/preview experience for generated documents (e.g., PPTX, PDF). Be someone the team can rely on to carry meaningful front-end work when needed.

• Provide technical guidance to the team. Set the bar in code review, weigh in on design docs, and help other engineers navigate a fast-moving AI-native codebase. Spot risk early — performance, complexity, streaming-state edge cases — and steer around it before it ships.

• Get streaming and async right. Handle the realities of long-running, asynchronous work end to end: partial/streaming state, loading and "generating" transitions, reconnection, large-payload handling, and graceful behavior when a request fails mid-flight.

• Raise quality. Write unit, integration, and end-to-end tests, instrument what you ship, and use logs, traces, and error tracking to debug issues that span the UI and the services behind it.

• Understand the context you're working in. Build a working model of how the system and its downstream dependencies behave, and use it to make good product and implementation calls rather than waiting for fully-specced tickets.

• Collaborate and mentor. Partner with product, design, and platform/backend engineers, and level up the engineers around you through review, pairing, and clear technical writing.

Who You Are

• Senior full-stack engineer. You've owned significant features and systems end to end across the stack — services, APIs, and UI — and operate with autonomy. You default to action, but you also think about the second-order effects of a design.

• Deep in JavaScript/TypeScript and Node. This is the center of the role. You write clean, type-safe code and lean on the type system rather than fight it, and you're comfortable owning backend services and APIs and reasoning about data flowing over REST and SSE.

• Genuinely full-stack, with real front-end depth where it counts. You have meaningful, hands-on React experience and a solid grasp of the web platform. What matters most here isn't breadth of UI work — it's judgment on the hard parts: streaming and asynchronous state, reconnection and mid-flight failure, rendering performance under long-running token streams, and accessibility. You can reach for AI tools to move fast, but you own the correctness of what ships rather than trusting generated code to get these edge cases right. You can lead front-end work when the team needs coverage, without needing it to be the bulk of your work.

• An architectural thinker. You can weigh trade-offs, write a clear design doc, and explain the "why" so others can build on it. You've helped shape the technical direction of a team, not just your own tickets.

• Fundamentals. Solid with relational databases (PostgreSQL) and SQL, Git, and CI/CD. You understand how applications get deployed to the cloud (AWS, GCP, or Azure) and how to operate what you ship.

• A multiplier. You explain technical ideas clearly, give constructive review, and raise the people and code around you. You're open to feedback and you disagree well.

• Education / experience. A Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience. Typically 6+ years of professional full stack / web application development, including experience providing technical leadership on a team.

Nice To Have

• Experience with a modern SSR/full-stack React framework (Next.js, Remix, or TanStack Start) and the surrounding ecosystem (Query, Form, Router).

• Familiarity with AI / LLM application development — streaming chat UIs, tool-calling, or agentic/multi-agent patterns. Depth here is a strong plus at this level.

• Experience building real-time or streaming interfaces (SSE, WebSockets) and the UX patterns that go with them.

• Familiarity with type-safe API contracts (tRPC, Hono RPC, or GraphQL) shared across a monorepo.

• Comfort with modern tooling: pnpm monorepos, Vite, and a TypeScript-first workflow.

• Experience with auth flows (Auth0, OAuth/OIDC, JWTs) in a single-page or SSR app.

• Familiarity with observability tooling — Sentry, OpenTelemetry, Prometheus/Grafana, or similar — for debugging and operating production systems.

• Experience in AdTech, MediaTech, or data-heavy product environments.

• Knowledge of scripting (Python, Go, or shell) for automation and testing.

$180,000 - $214,000 a year

Samba is an equal opportunity employer. We celebrate diversity and are committed to creating an inclusive environment for all employees. We strive to empower connection with one another, reflect the communities we serve, and tackle meaningful projects that make a real impact.