Staff Software Engineer, Web

Staff Software Engineer, Web

Everything else we do ends at chipmotors.com. The road trips, the launches, the posts that go well. It's where someone stops being curious and reserves one. You own it. Right now the web stack is built and maintained by people who each have three other jobs. It works, and it has gotten us to a national launch, but nobody's full-time job is the website. Yours is. You're the first engineer we've hired for it, and you're taking the handoff. That means the whole path: the React and TypeScript front end, the Go services behind it, and the parts in between. You'll report to the C-suite and work directly with social, marketing, and design, who will bring you rough ideas and need them live.

The stack

Go on the backend with Postgres underneath. React and TypeScript on the front end, Next.js App Router, Tailwind. Stripe for reservations. Cloudflare and Vercel in front of all of it. A good amount of the backend is generated by our own in-house tooling. You're inheriting a real codebase, not a greenfield. Parts of it are genuinely good. Parts of it were built in a week to hit a launch date and have been waiting for someone whose actual job is this.

What you'll do

• Own chipmotors.com end to end. The marketing site, the configurator, the reservation flow, and the customer portal, from the front end through the Go services behind it.

• Ship the configurator. It's where someone decides what their Chip looks like, and the closest thing we have to meeting him before he exists.

• Own the reservation flow. Checkout, payments, and the account portal people live in between reserving and delivery.

• Build and maintain the Go backend. APIs, data model, integrations, background jobs, and the boundaries between them.

• Own auth and sessions. Unglamorous, easy to get subtly wrong, and expensive when you do.

• Keep it fast. Page weight, Core Web Vitals, and the discipline to stop a marketing page from quietly gaining a megabyte.

• Own reliability. Deploys, staging, rollbacks, monitoring, and being the person who knows why it broke.

• Set the technical direction. What we build, what we buy, what we delete, and a written reason for each.

• Make it safe to move fast. Tests, CI, and enough guardrails that someone who isn't an engineer can change a headline without being afraid of it.

• Turn rough into live. Social and marketing bring you an idea and a deadline, and you decide how much of it is worth building.

• What you'll need

• Seven or more years building production web applications, including real ownership of something people used every day.

• Deep React and TypeScript. Next.js App Router in production, including the parts that are still sharp.

• Production Go. Services, APIs, and Postgres, not a weekend project.

• You've owned the whole path. Browser to API to database and back, including the parts that break at 2 a.m.

• Performance as a discipline. You treat page weight and Core Web Vitals as product features, not cleanup tickets.

• Payments or auth in production. Stripe, sessions, tokens, and a healthy respect for both.

• Comfortable being the only engineer on the surface. No team under you at the start, though you can bring in contract help where it earns its cost.

• Judgment about what not to build. Half this job is deciding which requests don't become code.

• You write things down. Decisions, tradeoffs, and the reason the weird thing is weird.

• Based in Austin, Miami, or Los Angeles, or remote in the United States.

• Most web engineers are deep on one side of this and serviceable on the other. If you're strong in React and TypeScript and genuinely want to go deeper in Go, or the other way around, tell us and show us the evidence. We'd rather have real depth plus appetite than two shallow halves.

• Bonus points

• Next.js App Router at scale. Server Components, streaming, caching.

• Cloudflare or Vercel platform depth. Workers, edge caching, object storage.

• Stripe past a basic checkout.

• Postgres performance work. Query plans, indexes, migrations against live data.

• Product configurators, ecommerce, or anything with a large permutation space.

• Consumer traffic that arrives in spikes because a post did well.

• Accessibility taken seriously.

• Design sense. You can make something look right without waiting for a mockup.

• Being the first engineer, or one of few, somewhere before this.

• What success looks like

• Nobody at Chip has to think about the website unless they want something new on it.

• Changes that used to wait for a free weekend ship the same week.

• The reservation flow doesn't lose people, and where it does, we know.

• A codebase the next engineer is productive in during their first week.

• Compensation and benefits

• $160,000 to $200,000, depending on experience.

• Equity in Chip.

• Eligible for our company healthcare plan.

About the company

Chip Chip is the first mass-market American robot, he just happens to be your car 1-10 Employees Austin 1-10 Automotive Products Robotics Hardware Manufacturing Automotive Robotics Electric Vehicles Transportation Mobility

Learn more about Chip

Founders Ilan Penn Founder

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