Senior Full-Stack Engineer

Senior Full-Stack Engineer

Gamer's Choice is a team of passionate gamers, creators, and innovators based in Queens, New York. What began as a small local shop has grown into one of the leading destinations for Trading Card Game players and collectors around the world. We're driven by a shared love for gaming and community, offering both an engaging online experience and a vibrant in-store atmosphere. Our mission is to be the ultimate home for fans to connect, compete, and celebrate the games they love. While Yu-Gi-Oh! has always been our foundation, we're expanding into exciting new titles like Pokémon, One Piece, Riftbound, and Disney Lorcana. Our Long Island City store serves as the heart of our community, hosting tournaments, events, and gatherings that bring players together both in person and online.

Location: On-site in our Long Island City, Queens Office

Schedule: Regular Hours Monday - Friday 9:00 am - 5:30 pm (may regularly require work outside these hours based on on-call issues, etc)

Reports to: Chief of Staff

Base Salary: $120,000 - $150,000 per annum

This role is designed for a seasoned full-stack engineer who thrives at the intersection of software and operations. You are most likely to succeed in this role if you:

• Have built and owned internal tools that directly support logistics, warehouse, or e-commerce operations.
• Are comfortable being the primary engineer on a complex, business-critical system, and accountable for its stability, security, and evolution.
• Can translate ambiguous, real-world operational pain points into scoped, shipped features on a weekly cadence.
• Communicate clearly with non-technical stakeholders and earn trust by delivering results, not just roadmaps.
• Use AI coding tools fluently as a productivity multiplier, while maintaining full ownership of code quality, tests, and architecture decisions.

What You'll Do:

Platform Ownership

• Serve as the sole owner and architect of the internal software, a Node/Express backend, React frontend, and SQLite database that supports every core operational workflow at Gamers Choice.
• Maintain system stability, security, and resilience, including authentication and authorization, database safety, backups, migrations, and incident response.
• Establish and maintain instrumentation, logging, and reporting so operations leadership has clear visibility into key performance metrics.

Feature Development

• Design, build, and ship new features that directly improve revenue, including break configuration, promotional flows, and upsell experiences.
• Build operational efficiency features for picking, packing, tasking, and footage retrieval workflows.
• Participate in regular collaboration with the Chief of Staff and on-floor teams to identify pain points and translate them into well-scoped projects.

Engineering Standards

• Use AI coding tools in a disciplined way to compress idea-to-deployment cycles, while owning all code quality, testing, and peer review.
• Maintain clear documentation of architecture, critical workflows, auth models, and database safety practices.
• Establish runbooks and operational guides that enable other team members to perform common diagnostics and basic changes independently over time.

Within the first 90 days, the Software Developer is expected to:

Days 1–60

• Implement monitoring, logging, and a simple dashboard or views for 3–5 core KPIs, such as mispick rate, orders picked per labor hour, time from order to "ready to ship," and incident count.
• Establish a reliable, documented baseline for each KPI so future performance can be measured accurately.

Days 61–90

• Identify and resolve known security vulnerabilities in the auth model, specifically privilege escalation and PIN brute-force vectors.
• Test and fully document a backup and restore process for the production database, with a clear step-by-step runbook.

How You Will Be Measured

Reliability & Stability

• Reduce software-related ops-blocking incidents by at least 50% within 6 months of the established baseline, and by at least 80% within 12 months.

Feature Delivery

• Ship at least 4 meaningful new features across streams, inventory, fulfillment, warehouse operations, or retail within 6 months, each tied to a defined KPI.
• Ship at least 8 total features within 12 months, collectively driving a 15–20% improvement in orders processed per labor hour and/or a measurable reduction in mis-pick or rework rates.

Documentation & Knowledge Transfer

• Produce clear documentation of system architecture, auth model, database safety mechanisms, and critical workflows within 6 months.
• Within 12 months, at least one additional team member should be able to perform common diagnostics and basic changes independently using those documents, without requiring your direct involvement.

Why This Role Matters

The Senior Full-Stack Engineer in some way touches every livestream we run, every order we fulfill, every card we pick and pack, and every piece of footage we retrieve. When everything works well, our team operates at its best. When it doesn't, streams stop, orders stall, and revenue is directly impacted.

We are at a pivotal point. The platform has grown quickly alongside our business, and it needs an experienced engineer to own it with the same care and discipline we bring to our product. This role is an opportunity to have a real, measurable impact, to take a system that is critical to a fast-growing operation and make it more stable, more capable, and more scalable, on a timeline that matters.

The Senior Full-Stack Engineer who joins Gamers Choice will be embedded in our operations, working side by side with the people who depend on this platform every day. Your work will be visible, your impact will be measurable, and your contributions will directly shape the direction of the company.

Qualifications

• At least 5 years of professional full-stack development experience with Node/Express and React, building production web applications.
• Demonstrated experience using AI coding tools (e.g., Claude, GitHub Copilot) as a core part of your workflow to ship faster, with concrete examples of how you verify and refactor AI-generated code.
• Prior experience building or owning internal tools for operations environments, logistics, warehouse, ecommerce, or retail, where reliability and efficiency had direct business consequences.
• Demonstrated ability to collaborate with non-technical managers and end-users; able to explain technical tradeoffs in plain language and work at the pace of the business.
• Willing and able to work on-site full-time in Long Island City, NYC, and to participate in an on-call rotation for urgent issues affecting live streams, fulfillment, or warehouse operations.

Preferred

• Interest or background in Pokémon TCG, trading cards, or graded cards.
• Experience with livestream commerce platforms (TikTok, Whatnot, Twitch) or multi-channel ecommerce (Shopify, marketplaces).
• Experience with media-heavy applications, ffmpeg, image/QR/barcode scanning, S3-compatible storage (e.g., Cloudflare R2).

Benefits

• Health Insurance
• Dental & Vision Coverage
• Paid Time Off
• 401(k)
• Employee Discounts
• Gym Membership Reimbursements

EEO/AAP Statement

Gamer's Choice is an equal opportunity employer. We acknowledge and honor the fundamental value and dignity of all individuals. We pledge ourselves to crafting and maintaining an environment that respects diverse traditions, heritages, and experiences. Gamer's Choice is an Equal Employment Opportunity and Affirmative Action employer. We do not discriminate based on race, religion, color, national origin, gender (including pregnancy, childbirth, or related medical conditions), sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, age, status as a protected veteran, status as an individual with a disability, or other applicable legally protected