Senior Software Engineer

Senior Software Engineer

Location:
Hybrid (Boston, Chicago)

About Youth Inc.

Youth Inc. is a venture-backed e-commerce marketplace and media network for youth and high school sports. We're building the technology platform that will define how 65M American families buy fan merchandise, team uniforms, and equipment. Our team is comprised of seasoned executives from leading e-commerce brands and prominent media and technology institutions. We are a customer focused, product first company, and use data to shape our daily actions, strategy, and vision.

The Role

We're looking for a Senior Engineer to scale and evolve our platform as we grow. Our marketplace has gone from zero to one with real customers, revenue, and operational complexity. We are looking for an engineer who demonstrates:

• Ownership:
  deliver what the team commits to and surface obstacles as quickly as possible.
• Leadership:
  rally the team to stay on track and work with cross-functional stakeholders to mitigate risks.
• Technical Stewardship:
  make sensible technical decisions that balance delivering value quickly with maintaining long-term system health and extensibility.

You'll partner with the Head of Engineering and the product team on direction and priorities, and will operate independently day to day, owning outcomes end to end.

Tech Stack

• Backend:
  Elixir + Phoenix LiveView (internal tools)
• Async Processing:
  Oban
• Data:
  PostgreSQL
• APIs:
  REST
• Search:
  Meilisearch
• Infrastructure:
  Linux, Docker, GitHub Actions, AWS, CDK
• Frontend:
  Next.js (Vercel), React, Payload CMS
• AI Tooling:
  Claude Code
• Alerts:
  Honeybadger

What You'll Do

• Serve as the tech lead for product and engineering initiatives assigned to you.
• Collaborate with stakeholders to define and refine scope.
• Sell your technical vision to other engineers and help us scale the system for exponential growth.
• Collaborate with partners to create robust, fault-tolerant integrations that minimize manual interventions.
• Deliver end-to-end capabilities that span all parts of our tech stack (infrastructure, data, APIs, UI).
• Create and present technical diagrams that showcase your vision — a picture is worth a thousand words, and a good diagram is worth a thousand Slack threads.
• Teach us something new and inspire us from time to time.

How We Work

• Small team, high trust:
  you own what you ship. We have your back.
• Fast but disciplined:
  small batches, frequent deployments, intentional tradeoffs.
• Strong opinions, loosely held:
  we value pragmatism and clarity.
• AI-assisted:
  we use Claude Code as a productivity accelerator. You are behind the steering wheel 100% of the time.

What We're Looking For

Required

• 7+ years of software engineering experience building and maintaining full-stack production systems with high SLAs and high traffic volumes (millions of users per month).
• Experience designing and tuning relational databases for high data volumes and high transaction throughput (querying and mutating tables with tens or hundreds of millions of rows).
• Experience with Elixir or an equivalent stack.
• Track record building data-intensive applications with high fault tolerance, low latency, and low incident-response times.
• Excellent written and verbal communication.
• Experience running containerized or serverless applications in the Cloud (AWS, GCP, Azure or similar).
• Instrumenting systems for observability (OTEL) and early detection of runtime exceptions and alerts.
• Building incident-response processes that minimize downtime and user impact. Resolving system alerts.

Nice to Have

• A/B testing, blue/green deployments, and gradual rollouts.
• Background in sports or athletics.

Compensation

• $120K–$190K base, depending on experience
• Meaningful equity
• Real impact on a real business

We are an equal opportunity employer. We explicitly encourage applicants with experience in athletics or sports culture to apply.