Senior Engineer (Full Stack, Frontend-Leaning)

Location: Albuquerque, NM / Hybrid (U.S.A). For all candidates outside of New Mexico: required to travel to New Mexico-based HQ once a quarter for a minimum of one week (M-F).

Position Type: Full-time

Reports to: Engineering Lead

About Apaluma

Apaluma Inc. is a startup dedicated to transforming dark data into actionable intelligence. We build AI-driven and physics-based technologies that help government agencies unlock insights from regulatory, environmental, and real-time monitoring data. Our mission is to provide transparent, data-backed decision-making tools to manage resources effectively and sustainably.

Our Team & How We Work

We are a small team. Engineering, data science, design, and product all work together directly. There is not a lot of ceremony, and people regularly move between areas as the work requires it. This role is a good fit if you like variety, take ownership of problems end to end, and are energized by working across disciplines.

Communication matters a lot to us. With a team this size, things move quickly and context gets lost if people are not talking to each other. We try to be direct and kind at the same time, give honest feedback, and keep each other in the loop without overloading on meetings.

AI tools are a required part of how we work not only for speed but to deepen our knowledge since we are also building AI tools. Everyone on the team uses LLMs, copilots, and other AI-assisted tooling in their daily workflows. We are looking for someone who already works this way or is ready to start.

Role Overview

This is a frontend-leaning full stack role. Most of the day-to-day involves our user-facing application, but the work does cross into backend and infrastructure when it needs to.

We care more about strong web development fundamentals than experience with a specific framework. The kind of person we are looking for understands why bundle size matters, thinks about load speed as a user experience issue, and can reason about what is happening between the browser and the server. Picking up a new framework is straightforward when the foundations are solid.

Our end users are government regulators, environmental scientists, and program managers. They are not power users and they do not have a lot of patience for slow or confusing interfaces. A big part of this role is caring about what the experience actually feels like on their end.

Key Responsibilities

Frontend & User Experience

• Own and improve our frontend application with a focus on performance, usability, and maintainability.
• Think about what the end user actually experiences: load times, responsiveness, clarity of the UI, and how errors are handled.
• Work with design and product to turn requirements into well-built interfaces that make sense for non-technical government users.
• Make informed decisions about bundle size, lazy loading, caching, and rendering strategies.

Full Stack Contributions

• Contribute to backend services and APIs as the work requires. This is a frontend-leaning role, not a frontend-only one.
• Work with cloud infrastructure to support data ingestion, storage, and retrieval.
• Participate in architectural decisions and bring a practical perspective on performance and maintainability.
• Debug and optimize across the full stack when issues come up.

Collaboration & Communication

• Work across functions with engineering, data science, design, and product on end-to-end feature delivery.
• Participate in sprint planning, standups, and retrospectives.
• Be clear about trade-offs, blockers, and what is and is not working. Ask questions early.
• Take care of your area of the codebase and push back constructively when a shortcut would hurt users.
• Help teammates through code reviews, pair programming, and knowledge sharing.

Who You Are

This section is less about credentials and more about fit. The people who do well here tend to share a few things in common:

• They have strong opinions about web fundamentals but change their minds when someone makes a good argument.
• They genuinely like working with other people and building things together.
• They communicate directly and respectfully. They give feedback, take it well, and do not let problems sit.
• They think about the person using the product, not just the code behind it.
• They learn quickly. They might not know every tool in our stack today, but they pick things up fast because the fundamentals are solid.
• They are comfortable when things are ambiguous or shifting. Startups are like that.

Qualifications

Required

• 5+ years of professional full stack development experience with a frontend emphasis.
• Deep foundational knowledge of web technologies: HTML, CSS, JavaScript, HTTP, browser rendering, and performance optimization.
• Experience building and maintaining production web applications used by real people.
• A practical understanding of performance: bundle size, lazy loading, caching, render strategies, and why they matter.
• Comfort working across the stack. Not necessarily a backend expert, but not afraid of an API endpoint or a database query.
• Strong communication skills, written and verbal. This role involves explaining technical decisions to non-engineers and writing documentation that other people actually read.

Big Pluses

• Experience with AWS services (ECS, S3, DynamoDB, or similar cloud infrastructure).
• Familiarity with Python and FastAPI or similar backend frameworks.
• Experience with Vue.js or comparable modern frontend frameworks (React, Svelte, etc.).
• Experience with TypeScript.
• Familiarity with data visualization frameworks and building dashboards.
• Understanding of DevOps practices (CI/CD pipelines, monitoring, automated testing).
• Interest or hands-on experience in AI/ML integration within applications.

Our Current Tech Stack

Listed here so you know what the work looks like day to day, not as a checklist. If you have strong fundamentals and a track record of picking things up, we want to hear from you regardless.

• Frontend: Vue.js with TypeScript & Tailwind
• Backend: Python with FastAPI, deployed on ECS
• Data/Storage: AWS S3, Postgres, SqlAlchemy/SqlModel

What We Offer

• Competitive salary and health benefits, including major medical, dental, and vision.
• Hybrid position with flexible work hours.
• A small, collaborative team that cares about the work and treats each other well.
• Real influence over technical direction and product decisions.
• Meaningful problems: environmental data, regulatory modernization, and public-sector decision intelligence.