Senior Full-Stack Software Engineer – Back-End Focused

Stand Together is a philanthropic community that helps America’s boldest changemakers tackle the root causes of our country’s biggest problems. As a Senior Full-Stack Software Engineer (Back-End Focused) on our Enterprise IT team, you will own the architecture and reliability of the backend systems powering high-visibility, consumer-facing web applications, ensuring their reliability and performance while mentoring engineers.

Responsibilities:

• Contribute to architecture, design, and technical decision-making across the full application stack, including React and Next.js frontends, Node.js backend services, Contentful CMS integrations, and AWS cloud infrastructure
• Design, build, and maintain scalable, secure, and high-performing APIs that serve as the foundation for consumer-facing applications
• Oversee CMS content modeling and editorial workflow optimization within Contentful CMS
• Improve CI/CD pipelines, deployment processes, monitoring, observability, and system reliability
• Ensure compliance with security, governance, and cloud infrastructure best practices within AWS, including IAM least-privilege, private S3 patterns, and secrets management
• Establish and enforce engineering standards, best practices, and scalable design patterns
• Provide technical mentorship, supervision, and performance guidance to engineers
• Partner with product, design, and business stakeholders to translate requirements into technical solutions
• Support sprint planning, technical estimation, roadmap development, and hiring efforts

Requirements:

• Bachelor's or master's degree in computer science, engineering, or a related field
• 7+ years of full-stack software engineering experience with a clear back-end focus, including demonstrated architectural responsibility
• Experience mentoring software engineers
• Excellent collaboration, communication, and cross-functional partnership skills
• Proficiency in JavaScript/TypeScript, Python, and PHP; strong Node.js backend experience, preferably with NestJS
• Experience designing and consuming APIs in distributed or microservices architectures
• Experience with JWT/OIDC authentication, including Auth0 or equivalent, and passport-jwt/JWKS patterns
• Proven experience with relational (SQL) and NoSQL databases — schema design, query optimization, multi-environment deployments, and operational MongoDB (replication, sharding, performance tuning) preferred
• Docker and container orchestration on AWS ECS (task definitions, logging, ECR)
• Working knowledge of core AWS services: Amplify, API Gateway, ALB/NLB, S3, EFS, CloudWatch, X-Ray, IAM, and VPC
• Experience building and maintaining automation within cloud-native environments using IaC frameworks (Terraform + Terragrunt)
• CI/CD experience with GitHub Actions and GitHub OIDC for secure AWS deployments
• Observability and production operations experience: logs, metrics, alarms, distributed tracing, and production troubleshooting
• Security best practices experience including IAM least-privilege, private S3 patterns, and secrets management
• Testing and quality discipline across unit, integration, and e2e layers (Jest), with strong linting and formatting standards
• Experience integrating headless CMS platforms with modern front-end frameworks
• Enthusiasm to contribute to Stand Together's vision and principled approach to solving problems, and a commitment to stewarding our culture, which champions values including transformation and innovation, entrepreneurialism, humility, and respect
• Experience supervising, coaching, and developing engineers, including performance feedback, goal-setting, and day-to-day work prioritization
• Experience with Contentful CMS, Drupal, and WordPress in headless or hybrid configurations
• Familiarity with Turborepo, pnpm, monorepo patterns, Storybook, and design systems
• Zod/schema-first validation and OpenAPI generation tooling experience
• Hands-on experience with CloudPosse Terraform modules and terragrunt layout patterns
• Performance tuning for Node.js applications and MongoDB, including caching strategy design
• Experience with EFS for stateful containers and mounting/permission management
• Knowledge of Checkov, Terraform security scanning, and Terraform CI checks