Staff Software Engineer

Our mission: to make it easy for anyone to make beautiful presentations, in minutes.

About Beautiful.ai

Beautiful.ai is changing the way the world presents by building fast, foolproof tools that enable anyone to tell visual stories that win. The Beautiful.ai team is a playful, driven, and passionate group of pet-lovers, video-gamers, and pickleball enthusiasts. With a globally-distributed remote team and a San Francisco-based office, we find unique opportunities to get to know each other personally, while delivering on our goals. Data-driven decision making and an outcomes-focused mindset are core to our way of working.

Today, Beautiful.ai equips 100,000+ happy paying customers, from start-ups to multinational Fortune 500 corporations, with a leading presentation software solution. Companies like SAP, HP, Rakuten, LIV Golf and more trust Beautiful.ai to tell their stories. We are a Series B company and have raised capital from prominent investors including Shasta Ventures, Trinity Ventures and First Round Capital and are led by our CTO/Founder, Mitch Grasso, who is a second-time founder in the presentation space.

About the role

As a Staff Software Engineer, you’ll take ownership of complex, high-impact features across the product, leveraging your deep expertise in full-stack development with JavaScript, Node.js, React, CSS, and MongoDB. You’ll lead technical initiatives, provide mentorship to senior engineers, and help define the technical direction of the product, ensuring scalability, performance, and alignment with business goals while driving innovation within the engineering team.

What you'll do:

• This is a hands-on role! You will be writing code and building systems as a major part of your day-to-day work.
• Lead the design and development of high-impact features and services across the full stack using JavaScript, Node.js, React, CSS, and MongoDB, ensuring scalability, performance, maintainability, and a delightful user experience.
• Provide technical leadership within the team, driving best practices and ensuring that high engineering standards are maintained across the product.
• Mentor and guide senior and junior engineers, helping them grow their technical expertise and ensuring effective knowledge sharing within the team. Play a key role in developing the team’s technical capabilities.
• Collaborate with cross-functional teams, including product management, design, and other engineering teams, to shape the direction of new features and improvements.
• Own complex technical challenges, from troubleshooting and debugging to optimizing performance and improving the architecture of core components.
• Define and implement technical strategies for improving the overall product, such as optimizing front-end performance and reliability, improving code quality, or enhancing the CI/CD pipeline.

• Troubleshoot and resolve incidents during on-call rotations, ensuring minimal downtime and fast recovery.

What we expect from you:

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field (or equivalent practical experience). A Master’s degree is a plus.
• 7+ years of hands-on experience in Software Engineering, with a product development focus.
• Strong hands-on experience with react, typescript, javascript, and full stack development is required.
• Proven track record of delivering high impact product features from product definition and planning through execution to successful completion.
• Strong product and analytical thinking, with the ability to collaborate closely with product partners to evaluate tradeoffs, assess technical feasibility, and guide decision-making through clear pros/cons analysis grounded in technical complexity, effort, and impact.
• Excellent communication and collaboration skills, with the ability to articulate complex technical concepts clearly to both technical and non-technical audiences. Ability to take on a role of a thought leader for the team and influence technical decisions throughout the organization.
• Demonstrated ability to partner with organizational leadership to help shape engineering strategy, influence resourcing decisions, and contribute to effective team design.
• Bay Area candidates preferred, or open to occasional travel as needed.

Our tech stack

Client Side: React, Webpack, vanilla Typescript/Javascript for SVG layout, rendering, and styling
Server Side: Node.js with Express for API and server side rendering, various distributed node.js microservices
Infrastructure on Google Cloud: App Engine, Firebase, MongoDB, PostgreSQL, Stackdriver, Storage

Benefits:

• Flexible Time-Off & Remote Work
  
• Health Insurance – 100% employer-paid Medical, Dental, and Vision coverage for employees; 60–65% coverage for dependents.
  
• Retirement Plan – Comprehensive 401(k) program.
  
• Savings Accounts – Flexible Spending Account (FSA) and Health Savings Account (HSA) options available.
  
• Equity Compensation – Competitive equity package with a 4-year vesting schedule.
  
• Life, AD&D, and Disability Insurance – Coverage provided where applicable.
  
• Parental Leave – Inclusive leave for birthing and non-birthing parents; policies vary by state.
  
• Volunteer Time Off (VTO) – Paid day off to support a nonprofit or community cause.