[Hiring] Staff Software Engineer @LawnStarter

Role Description

You're the engineering anchor of an initiative — working as part of a tight team with your PM and designer, and alongside engineering peers on adjacent initiatives. You have a hand in the full lifecycle:

• Shaping the problem
• Deciding the technical approach
• Directing AI agents to implement much of the code
• Shipping to production
• Owning the outcome with your team

You're measured by impact, not by lines of code merged. When an agent can ship something safely, your job is to make sure it's done right and the metric moves. When the work calls for careful, hand-written code in a sensitive area, you write it yourself.

What makes this role exciting:

• You ship end-to-end, from problem-framing through production to the post-launch metric review.
• You work as a true product partner, bringing engineering judgment to product calls and product sense to engineering calls.
• You get real autonomy, making most technical calls yourself with architect review on significant architectural decisions.
• You operate at a staff bar, trusted to make the call, ship the hard thing, and stand behind the outcome.

What You'll Own

• The technical approach — architecture, data model, integration choices, rollout plan, observability, and rollback strategy for your initiative.
• Implementation quality — prompts, guardrails, evals, tests, and review loop that let agents ship safe, correct, production-ready code.
• Cross-functional partnership — daily working contact with your PM and designer, regular collaboration with engineering peers, and weekly check-ins with your EM.
• The initiative outcome — the metric the initiative was set up to move.
• A high bar for what ships — production correctness, security, performance, observability, and the experience for customers and pros.

Problems to Solve

• Leading AI agents at a staff-level quality bar.
• Owning decisions with high autonomy.
• Shipping outcomes, not features.

What Success Looks Like (Year 1)

• Initiative outcomes hit — 3–4 initiatives shipped end-to-end, with at least two clearly moving their metric.
• Agent workflow that travels — prompts, evals, and review loop picked up by peers on other initiatives.
• Faster cycle time — median time from problem-framing to first production rollout meaningfully shorter.
• Quality holds — no customer- or pro-facing regression traceable to agent-authored code.
• Visible leverage — peers point to artifacts you left behind as references they use.

Who You Are

• AI-native — experienced with Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, or equivalent.
• Operating at a lead level — making the call, shipping the hard thing, and standing behind whether it worked.
• Outcome-driven — measuring your week in "did the metric move" and "did the experience get better."
• A strong horizontal partner — collaborating well with PMs, designers, and engineering peers.
• Decisive and documented — making architecture, data-model, and rollout calls and writing them down.
• A force multiplier — leaving reusable artifacts behind.
• Customer- and pro-minded — caring about outcomes for both sides of the marketplace.

Good to Know

• An individual-contributor role with room to grow.
• A product-engineering role, end-to-end.
• Hands-on, with a high quality bar.
• Shipping to a live marketplace with $150M+ in bookings.

Tech You'll Touch

• AI agents — Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, internal agent stack, MCP servers, evals tooling.
• Backend — PHP/Laravel.
• Frontend — TypeScript/React/React Native.
• Data — Redshift, dbt, Segment, Airflow.
• Infra — AWS, Datadog, Sentry, GitHub Actions.
• Documentation & process — Brain, Confluence, Jira.

Salary and Benefits

• Competitive salary of USD $85,000–$125,000 annual base.
• Work from anywhere.
• High ownership and autonomy.
• Fast-moving team that loves to build, learn, and grow.