Senior Software Engineer

Role Description

We're looking for a Senior Software Engineer — someone who thrives on building, shipping, and iterating fast. You'll be the second full-time engineer on the team, working alongside our Founding Engineer and a team of contract engineers to build the features and infrastructure behind Surface.

You'll report to one of our Co-Founders and collaborate closely with the engineering and product team to turn product vision into production-ready software. This is a hands-on building role — not a strategy or architecture ownership role — for someone who wants to write great code, solve hard problems, and ship constantly.

What You'll Do

• Build core product experiences end-to-end, especially new AI-driven features and intelligence layers.
• Ship production-quality code across the stack — frontend, backend, data pipelines, and integrations.
• Prototype rapidly, using AI tools to accelerate development, explore ideas, and test assumptions.
• Collaborate closely with the Founding Engineer to establish and evolve engineering patterns, tooling, and best practices.
• Work with contract engineers to coordinate delivery and maintain quality across the codebase.
• Apply engineering best practices around security, testing, observability, and reliability — lightweight and pragmatic.
• Operate with a strong bias toward speed, clarity, simplicity, and quality.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of full-stack engineering experience and love shipping real production software. Experience building enterprise software is a plus, but not required.
• Deeply AI-first in how you build — you actively rely on tools like Claude, Cursor, Copilot, GPT-4 to speed development and generate ideas.
• Fluent with modern front-end and full-stack frameworks (e.g., shadcn/ui, Next.js or equivalent, Tailwind, Node.js, TypeScript).
• Thrive in early-stage environments where priorities shift and you have wide autonomy over how you build.
• Operate with a builder’s mindset: fast iterations, pragmatic solutions, and a willingness to prototype and learn.
• Value both speed and quality — you move fast without creating chaos.
• Care about data security and good engineering hygiene (GDPR, SOC2, secure architecture).
• Believe healthy workplace culture matters, and want to build a mission-driven product that makes work better for everyone.
• Enjoy working with non-technical stakeholders and can communicate technical ideas to non-engineers.

Company Description

Paradigm is a talent and intelligence company that helps our customers build healthy, high-performance cultures where everyone can do their best work. We’ve helped 1,200+ companies improve their cultures since our founding in 2014 and we recently launched Surface.ai, our talent and culture intelligence platform that transforms how companies understand and improve culture in real time.

Paradigm is a fully remote company committed to building a culture where people can do their best work while maintaining balance and well-being across their lives. We believe diverse perspectives strengthen teams and improve outcomes, and we’re committed to creating an environment where people from all backgrounds feel supported and able to thrive.

The compensation range for this Senior Software Engineer role includes an annual base salary of $150,000, plus bonus and equity.