Senior Software Engineer

Lift AI builds software for the elevator industry, where paper inspection reports and faxed maintenance tickets are still normal. Almost no one is building software for this market. We manage ~5,000 properties and have 1,000+ IoT deployments on elevators across the US. The platform handles asset management, maintenance workflows, contract tracking, and an AI pipeline that extracts structured data from elevator industry documents. Django/PostgreSQL backend, React/TypeScript frontend, all on AWS. The CEO's family has been in the elevator industry for 40 years — we're not outsiders guessing at what the market needs. You'd be our third engineer. The team is me (CTO, I write code daily, Central Time), one engineer who's been here two years and knows the domain well, and our Chief of Product who handles the PM side. No QA team, no DevOps. You own what you build. First project: we acquired a field maintenance product that currently runs on Firebase/Firestore. You'd design the migration of its backend onto our Django/PostgreSQL stack, including figuring out a replacement for Firestore's offline sync (we're looking at ElectricSQL). You define the API contract, our other engineer builds the frontend against it. Beyond that, we're actively building AI features. One example: an invoice dispute agent that communicates directly with service providers. You'd help architect those. Stack: Django 5 / DRF, PostgreSQL, Redis, Django Q, React Router v7, TypeScript, MUI, AWS (CDK, ECS Fargate, ElastiCache, RDS), GitHub Actions. AI features use Claude, OpenAI, and LangChain. We're async but not siloed — Slack, GitHub PRs, and Linear are where most collaboration happens, with the occasional video call. No standups. We follow Shape Up with 4-week cycles. I review architecture proposals for your first ~90 days, then you own your domains. No on-call rotation. We don't do evening releases, and when something rare breaks, everyone pitches in. $100K base + 0.50–0.75% equity. We have ~5,000 customers and growing revenue, so the equity isn't a lottery ticket. $100K is below big-city market rate and we know that. We're not focused on titles or hierarchy. Growth here means the scope of what you own keeps expanding, and comp grows with it. 5+ years experience. Python (Django, Flask, or FastAPI) and React/TypeScript in production. You've built something from architecture to deployment without someone telling you how. If you've been engineer #2-5 at a startup, or you're a senior engineer tired of process overhead, or you're at an agency and want to go deep on one product, this is that kind of role. [email protected] — send something you've built that you're proud of, and tell us why.

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