Senior Software Engineer
A small New York company is hiring a senior software engineer. The company owns a portfolio of property-management software eight production applications across web, iOS, and Android, used every day by paying users. Day-to-day implementation against that estate is currently handled by an offshore subcontractor team. We want someone in-house, full time, to own the technical bar over what that team ships, and to do that using an AI development harness we have been building over the last several months.
The harness is the unusual part of this job. It is a working system designed around an agentic coding CLI (currently Claude Code) with mechanical guardrails layered on top of it. It indexes every production repository into a queryable code graph. It drafts tickets from findings, attaches acceptance criteria to them, and routes them to the offshore queue. It scores incoming pull requests against those criteria with file-and-line evidence. In sandbox mode against a permitted set of repositories, the harness writes code itself behind a layered push defense, a quality gate that must pass before any commit, custom hooks that block bad patterns at the tool boundary, and an append-only audit trail. The harness was built by a non-engineer operator on the team and works. What it lacks is a real engineer at the helm someone with the judgment to decide when it is right, when it is wrong, when to override it, and when to extend it.
That engineer is the role.
What the day looks like
Most of your time is the legacy estate. The offshore team writes the code; you decide what they work on, what gets prioritized, and whether what they ship meets the bar to merge. You will use the harness to investigate bugs, file findings with file-and-line evidence, draft tickets, review pull requests, and where the harness permits it fix issues yourself locally through its sandbox mode.
You will pair with the operator on the harness itself. Every new failure mode you find gets encoded as a hook, a rule, or a skill update so it does not recur. The system has been built that way deliberately; you contribute to it.
You will also handle occasional IT for the small in-person office. A laptop that will not connect, a printer that has stopped, an account that needs access. It is not a sysadmin role and it will not be most of your week, but it is real and it sits with this seat.
By the end of your first 30 days we expect you to be running all of this independently. The first 30 days are a paid trial and ramp; after that, you operate without hand-holding.
The two forward paths
Once the legacy estate and the offshore queue are under steady control, the company faces a strategic choice. Which path we take will depend in part on what you and the operator find achievable with the harness. Both are on the table, and the description does not promise which one:
The first path is a managed migration of the legacy stack moving the production codebase off CodeIgniter and onto current Laravel, executed through the harness, with the offshore team carrying the implementation work and you driving design and the quality gates.
The second path is to finish a partial in-house rebuild on a modern TypeScript stack (Next.js, a typed RPC layer, a relational ORM). The rebuild was started before this role existed and stalled for lack of engineering ownership. The architecture is in place and the core surfaces exist; meaningful work remains, but you are not starting from a blank repository.
The decision will be made within or shortly after the first 30 days, based on what we both learn during the trial.
Who we are looking for
Five or more years of professional software engineering with production systems shipped. Real fluency in PHP and in modern fullstack TypeScript. Comfort across iOS and Android is a plus but not required the legacy estate spans all of them and you will need to be able to read all of them even if you only write some.
You should be able to read a few thousand lines of unfamiliar code and form a load-bearing opinion in a day. You should be comfortable with mechanical quality gates (custom lint rules, structural code search, dependency rules, hooks at the tool boundary) and see them as leverage rather than friction. You should be willing to be the sole engineer in the building and to make architectural calls without waiting for someone else to sign off.
Most importantly: you have to actually be doing AI-first development, not just be open to it. Claude Code or an equivalent agentic CLI, with hooks or rules or skills wired in to enforce your standards. If your current relationship with AI coding tools is 'I ask it for snippets and code-review the snippets', this is the wrong role. The harness is built for engineers who dispatch agents on whole units of work, audit what comes back, correct the prompt loop, and ship at several times a hand-coded baseline. That is the working model.
You will be paired with a non-engineer operator who built the harness and runs it day to day. He knows the prompt-failure modes intimately. You bring the engineering judgment the system is missing. The pair is symmetric your judgment is load-bearing, but so is his, and neither of you reports to the other.
Logistics
In-person at the New York office. Remote considered for exceptionally well-qualified candidates.
Compensation is open and commensurate with experience.
After an initial conversation, the first 30 days are a paid trial. During the trial you will orient on the harness, work down a real slice of the current backlog, and run at least one piece of work end-to-end either through the harness against the legacy estate or against the in-house rebuild, depending on which forward path looks more relevant by then. At the end of 30 days the role either continues permanently or it does not, against criteria set with you at the start.
To apply
Your GitHub, or a code sample from a real production codebase you contributed to. Not a tutorial.
A short, honest answer to: what do you currently dispatch your AI coding tools on, what do you still write by hand, and what would have to change for the by-hand list to shrink?
Anything else you would want us to see.
Pay: $45,000.00 - $85,000.00 per year
Work Location: In person
