Understood.org
Senior Full-Stack Engineer
New York, NY · Senior
No sponsorshipDetected 90 days ago
TypeScriptPythonReactNext.jsReact NativeDjangoBackend DevelopmentFull-Stack DevelopmentCode ReviewSQLPostgreSQLMySQLRedisVector DatabasesAWSGCPDockerKubernetesDatadogRESTLLMsRAGLangGraphAI Orchestration
About the role
- About Understood Understood is a nonprofit focused on shaping the world for difference.
- We raise awareness of the challenges and strengths of people who learn and think differently.
- We have five core values: - Continuously learn. - Act with intention. - Champion difference. - Inspire change. - Grow together.
Responsibilities
- Collaborate with cross-functional teams (product, design, data, content) to design, develop, and maintain features across the full stack
- Build high-quality, accessible frontend experiences in Next.js, React, and TypeScript, including the stateful, streaming chat and multimodal (voice, text-to-speech, speech-to-text) interfaces that power our AI assistants.
- Own your work across the entire software development lifecycle, from architecture and planning through development, deployment, and monitoring
- Stay close to the people we serve. Dig into user feedback, support tickets, and product analytics to find the real problem, then ship the smallest change that solves it.
- Collaborate effectively with both internal teams and external development partners to co-design solutions, troubleshoot integrations, and review code
- Strong expertise in TypeScript, React, and Next.js, including experience building stateful, streaming interfaces
- Demonstrated ability leading projects as a technical lead
- Experience building real-time, multimodal AI experiences (streaming text, voice, TTS/STT, Web Audio, WebRTC, real-time OpenAI SDKs), including optimizing latency and time-to-first-token (TTFT) in production.
- Experience building or contributing to trust and safety systems (content moderation, input/output filtering, guardrails for AI-generated content)
- Familiarity with privacy-by-design principles, data classification, and consent management in user-facing products
Requirements
- The ideal candidate is comfortable working across the stack-from React and Next.js on the frontend to Python and Django on the backend-and brings demonstrated experience with LLM-powered products.
- Demonstrated experience with Python and Django (or equivalent backend frameworks)
- Proficiency in designing and building RESTful API's
- Experience with retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) and vector databases (Pinecone, Weaviate, pgvector, or similar).
- Experience with Contentful
- Experience with asynchronous programming and task queues
- Experience with Docker and/or Kubernetes
- Experience with React Native or mobile app development
Compensation
- The base salary range for this role is minimum $155,000 - $175,000 maximum, depending on years of experience and qualifications.
Benefits
- Understanding of compliance frameworks relevant to health-adjacent or child-focused digital products (e.g., COPPA, state companion-app laws, SOC 2, ISO 42001)
- own your services' health
- Experience monitoring and instrumenting production services; we use Datadog and expect engineers to own their services' health
Company info
- Genuine interest in user problems. You read the support inbox, watch session replays, and treat "is this actually working for people?" as part of the definition of done.
Visa & Work Authorization
- Understood.org does not sponsor applicants for work visas or legal permanent residence, including providing assistance with OPT extensions.
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This listing is sourced directly from Understood.org's careers page and normalized into a canonical job model.