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.