Sr. Full-Stack Engineer

Requirements

• Rockstar is recruiting for the nation’s leading school choice advocacy organization and its affiliated national scholarship granting organization. The advocacy organization works to empower families, especially lower-income families, with the freedom to choose the best K-12 education for their children. The scholarship fund is building the national platform to raise billions of new dollars for K-12 scholarships through the

Education

• Freedom Tax Credit (EFTC), which beginning January 1, 2027, will allow donors to contribute to scholarship-granting organizations and receive a dollar-for-dollar federal tax credit of up to $1,700. This is a unique opportunity to join a small, cross-functional pod in Austin and help set the technical patterns for a growing engineering organization ahead of the EFTC’s launch.

• Location: Austin, TX (in person)

The Opportunity

The Senior Full-Stack Engineer builds the web applications and platform services behind the scholarship fund’s work: the Partner Portal and its behavioral platforms. Working in person in Austin within a small, cross-functional pod alongside a Product Manager and Operations/CI partners, the engineer will own products from first prototype through production and ongoing improvement. As the organization grows its engineering team ahead of the

Education

• Freedom Tax Credit’s launch, the engineer will help set the technical patterns that let multiple pods build independently without fragmenting the architecture.

What You Will Own

Web Applications & Platform Services

• Design and build web applications and platform services from first prototype to production
• Build within the Partner Portal, a Next.js / TypeScript / Convex application hosted on Vercel, with Clerk for authentication and Sentry for monitoring, as well as the behavioral platforms
• Build clean, accessible front ends and reliable back-end services and APIs
• Design and build AI-powered features, including LLM-powered tools, chatbots, and AI-assisted workflows, where they add real value
• Write well-tested, maintainable code, take an active part in code review, and instrument features with logging and error monitoring so issues are caught before users notice them
• Ship through the team’s CI/CD pipelines across dev, staging, and production, applying shared security practices: authentication, access control, and dependency updates

Systems Integration

• Build and maintain custom APIs and integrations between the organization’s applications and third-party platforms
• Handle the details that make integrations dependable: authentication, pagination, rate limits, retries, error handling, and logging
• Support data pipelines and data quality checks that feed reporting and day-to-day operations

Product, Team & Partner Collaboration

• Partner closely with the Product Manager to translate product goals and business requirements into technical approaches, scope work, identify tradeoffs, and deliver iteratively
• Work directly with designers, program staff, and stakeholders to understand needs and validate solutions
• Serve as a technical point of contact for third-party vendors, agencies, and platform providers, leading integration work (API contracts, data formats, timelines, and testing) and reviewing partner-delivered code for quality, security, and architectural fit
• Evaluate new tools and vendors and make clear build-vs-buy recommendations
• Step in to support other pods and projects as priorities shift

Who You Are

A senior engineer who is as comfortable architecting a system as writing the code to build it, and who does their best work as part of a small, in-person team. Specifically:

• AI-native: You architect and direct while AI executes. AI-assisted development isn’t a bonus here; it’s how you already work.
• Biased toward action: You identify problems, propose solutions, and move without waiting to be asked.
• Flexible and communicative: You move across pods and projects as needs change, document your work, and keep others informed in an environment where the work is not always fully defined.

What You Bring

• 6+ years of full-stack engineering experience with demonstrated ownership of both front-end and back-end systems
• Proficiency in React and Next.js; the Partner Portal is built on this stack and you will be expected to contribute to it
• Strong TypeScript skills, plus back-end experience with Node.js and RESTful APIs
• Strong API integration experience (authentication, pagination, rate limits, retries, error handling, and logging), including webhooks and server-side events
• Strong SQL skills and experience with relational databases and cloud data stores
• A track record of shipping tested, production-quality code through modern Git and CI/CD workflows
• Experience in cross-functional product teams alongside Product Managers, and working directly with third-party vendors, agencies, or platform providers on technical deliverables
• Ability to translate between business needs and engineering decisions for technical and non-technical stakeholders
• Ability to work in person at the Austin, Texas office

Nice to Have

• Hands-on AWS experience (e.g., ECS, Lambda, RDS, IAM, CloudWatch)
• DevOps experience: owning CI/CD pipelines (GitHub Actions), environment management, and deployment tooling
• Infrastructure-as-code experience (e.g., AWS SAM)
• Experience setting up monitoring, logging, and alerting across dev, staging, and production

Benefits

• The organization offers comprehensive health and dental plans, a 401(k) with a 5% match, vacation time, and office closures for the weeks of Christmas and the Fourth of July, among other benefits.