[Hiring] Senior Software Engineer @SamCart

Role Description

Writing the code is no longer the hard part of this job. The engineering is. AI writes most of the code at SamCart, and Claude Code is standard-issue here. Engineers spend their days deciding what gets built, directing agents to build it, judging whether what came back is actually right, and owning the result in production. The discernment is the expensive part: knowing where Claude's output won't hold up in our system, and saying so.

This is a deep engineering role first, but you'll sit closer to product than you might elsewhere. You'll partner with our Product Managers early — pushing on scope, flagging what's expensive, helping decide what's worth building — then own getting it shipped. What you won't get is a finished spec handed over the wall.

We're a startup and we operate lean, so you'll work directly with our engineering leads, product managers, and executive leadership. Broad ownership, real consequences, and a strong bias toward execution.

What You'll Do

• Take a problem from a loose brief to shipped and stable. You own the design, the review, and the outcome, with AI doing the majority of the coding.
• Make architecture calls in a mature PHP codebase and a React/Next.js front end — where to extend, where to refactor, and where to leave well enough alone.
• Review AI output the way a senior engineer reviews a junior's PR: fast, skeptical, and specific. Catching where the model is confidently wrong is core to the job.
• Own your work in production. You ship it, you watch it, you fix it.
• Improve how the team builds — the AI workflows, our MCP tooling, and the tests that make agent-written code safe to merge.

Qualifications

• 6+ years building and shipping production web applications, several of them at a senior level.
• Deep expertise in at least one domain or system.
• You've been the person others came to, and you can explain the tradeoffs behind how it was built.
• Architecture-capable, execution-biased.
• You can whiteboard the right long-term system, then ship the pragmatic version now and explain the tradeoff you made.
• AI-native. You use Claude daily like a teammate, and you're just as comfortable catching where it's wrong.
• You raise the bar around you through mentoring, teaching, and improving how the whole team builds.
• Full-stack, and comfortable in someone else's codebase.
• Real systems have history. You can tell what's merely ugly from what's actually wrong.
• Located on the East Coast (US), ideally in or near Charleston, SC.

Requirements

• Strongly Preferred: PHP/Laravel and React/TypeScript, AWS, e-commerce or payments experience, hands-on work with agent or MCP tooling, or time as one of the first engineers at a startup.

Benefits

• The best AI tools out there, plus hands-on learning labs to build your skills.
• Unlimited PTO with an encouraged 14-day minimum.
• Health insurance premiums covered 100% for you +1.
• Supportive parental leave for all parents, 401k, and a monthly lunch credit.
• Quarterly in-person gatherings, including SamCamp, our multi-day all-company offsite.
• A small, fast-moving team where your work is visible and your impact is real.

Company Description

Our core values:

• Play to Win.
• Take Risks, Embrace Failure.
• Complexity is the Enemy.
• Ahead of the Curve, Always.
• The Customer is Everything.
• Work with Purpose, Live with Balance.