Organization: The Church Online
Location: Fully Remote
Reports To: Technical Architect
Type: Independent Contractor
Schedule / Availability: Some regular working availability and sufficient overlap with our team between 8:30 AM–5:30 PM U.S. Eastern Time is required.
Position Overview
The Church Online is seeking an experienced Full-Stack SaaS Engineer to help design, build, and maintain modern web-based SaaS applications and platforms.
This is a hands-on engineering role for someone who can take a feature from technical requirements through production—including frontend development, backend services, APIs, database design, integrations, testing, and deployment.
You will work across multiple SaaS initiatives, including new product development, customer and administrative interfaces, dashboards, workflow applications, integrations, and platform infrastructure.
We are looking for a product-minded engineer, not simply a frontend or backend developer. You should understand how the entire application fits together and be comfortable taking ownership of features across the stack.
Our engineering environment emphasizes clear architecture, documentation-first development, modern cloud infrastructure, and effective use of AI-assisted development tools.
Core Responsibilities
- Full-Stack Application Development
- Design and build production-ready SaaS features from frontend through backend.
- Develop modern web applications using React, Next.js, TypeScript, and related technologies.
- Build responsive, intuitive, and accessible user interfaces.
- Develop backend services, business logic, and application APIs.
- Design and maintain relational database schemas, migrations, queries, and data access patterns.
- Build administrative dashboards, customer portals, workflow interfaces, and internal applications.
- Maintain strong type safety and consistent coding standards throughout the application.
- Troubleshoot issues across frontend, backend, database, infrastructure, and integration layers.
- SaaS Platform Development
- Build and maintain multi-tenant SaaS applications.
- Implement tenant-aware data access and application functionality.
- Develop account, organization, user, and permission management features.
- Build role-based access control and authorization systems.
- Develop subscription, account management, and platform administration functionality.
- Design applications for scalability, reliability, maintainability, and security.
- Build reusable components and services that can support multiple applications and products.
- API & Integration Development
- Design and implement secure RESTful APIs.
- Integrate SaaS applications with external platforms and services.
- Work with REST APIs, JSON, webhooks, OAuth, and other common integration technologies.
- Develop middleware and service layers between frontend applications and internal or third-party platforms.
- Build reliable data synchronization processes.
- Implement appropriate validation, authentication, authorization, logging, and error handling.
- Develop retry and failure-handling strategies for external integrations.
- Maintain clear API and integration documentation.
- Database & Backend Engineering
- Design scalable relational database structures.
- Create and maintain database migrations.
- Write efficient queries and identify performance bottlenecks.
- Develop backend business logic and service layers.
- Implement caching strategies when appropriate.
- Maintain appropriate tenant and user data isolation.
- Apply secure software development practices to sensitive application data.
- Cloud Infrastructure & DevOps
- Deploy and maintain applications within AWS or comparable cloud environments.
- Work with containerized applications using Docker.
- Participate in infrastructure-as-code workflows.
- Maintain and improve CI/CD pipelines.
- Work with cloud services for application hosting, databases, storage, content delivery, authentication, logging, and monitoring.
- Assist with application scaling, reliability, monitoring, and troubleshooting.
- Support development, staging, and production environments.
- Quality, Security & Testing
- Write maintainable, production-quality code.
- Participate in peer code reviews.
- Develop automated tests where appropriate, including unit, integration, and end-to-end testing.
- Identify and address security vulnerabilities.
- Follow secure authentication, authorization, API, and data-handling practices.
- Monitor application behavior and troubleshoot production issues.
- Consider edge cases, failure conditions, performance, and security during implementation—not after development is complete.
AI-Assisted Development
AI-assisted software development is an important part of our engineering workflow. The engineer should be comfortable using modern development tools such as Claude, OpenAI Codex, Cursor, GitHub Copilot, or equivalent platforms to improve development speed and quality.
- Use AI tools to assist with architecture analysis, implementation, debugging, testing, refactoring, and documentation.
- Provide sufficient application context and technical constraints when generating code.
- Critically evaluate AI-generated code rather than accepting it without review.
- Validate generated code for correctness, security, performance, maintainability, and architectural fit.
- Understand when AI-assisted solutions should be modified or rejected.
- Continuously improve AI-assisted engineering workflows.
- AI tools should accelerate strong engineering practices—not replace engineering judgment.
- Architecture & Documentation
- Work from technical specifications and architectural requirements.
- Participate in documentation-first development.
- Contribute to technical specifications and Architecture Decision Records when appropriate.
- Document APIs, integrations, application architecture, infrastructure, and deployment procedures.
- Communicate technical decisions clearly with architects, developers, and stakeholders.
- Participate in code reviews and contribute to engineering standards.
Required Qualifications
- 3+ years of professional full-stack software development experience, preferably building SaaS or web applications.
- Strong proficiency with JavaScript and TypeScript.
- Strong experience with React and modern frontend application development.
- Professional experience with Next.js or a comparable modern web application framework.
- Experience developing backend application services and APIs.
- Strong understanding of REST APIs, JSON, webhooks, and API integrations.
- Production experience with PostgreSQL or another relational database.
- Understanding of relational database design, indexing, migrations, and query optimization.
- Experience implementing authentication and authorization.
- Understanding of role-based access control and application security.
- Experience integrating third-party APIs and SaaS platforms.
- Experience with Git and collaborative development workflows.
- Experience with Docker and containerized application development.
- Experience deploying and supporting applications in AWS or another major cloud platform.
- Experience working with CI/CD pipelines.
- Understanding of automated software testing practices.
- Strong debugging and problem-solving skills.
- Ability to work across frontend, backend, database, and infrastructure layers.
- Ability to independently take a feature from specification through production.
- Strong written communication and technical documentation skills.
- Experience using modern AI-assisted development tools as part of a professional development workflow.
- Ability to work independently and manage priorities in a fully remote environment.
Preferred Qualifications
- Experience building multi-tenant SaaS platforms.
- Advanced experience with Next.js, including the App Router and server-side application patterns.
- Experience with AWS services such as ECS/Fargate, Lambda, RDS, S3, CloudFront, IAM, CloudWatch, or related services.
- Experience with Infrastructure as Code using AWS CDK, Terraform, CloudFormation, or equivalent technologies.
- Experience with Redis or other caching technologies.
- Experience implementing subscription billing or payment systems.
- Experience building customer portals, administrative dashboards, or workflow applications.
- Experience integrating enterprise SaaS platforms.
- Experience with OAuth 2.0 and complex third-party API integrations.
- Experience with event-driven architectures, queues, or asynchronous processing.
- Experience with real-time application technologies such as WebSockets or Server-Sent Events.
- Experience designing and implementing scalable SaaS architecture.
- Familiarity with observability, application monitoring, and performance optimization.
- Experience working in a small or high-growth engineering team.
- Experience with church technology, ministry software, nonprofit organizations, or mission-driven technology.
Availability & Work Arrangement
This is an independent contractor role. Candidates must be able to work independently in a remote environment while maintaining consistent communication and collaboration with the team.
The contractor must maintain some regular working availability and sufficient overlap with our team between 8:30 AM and 5:30 PM U.S. Eastern Time. Full availability throughout that entire window is not required, but there must be enough overlap to support meetings, communication, and project coordination.
What We're Looking For
The strongest candidate can be given a business or product requirement and independently work through the technical implementation.
For example, given a requirement to build a customer-facing workflow, the engineer should be comfortable determining how to:
Build the user interface.
Design the frontend application state and interactions.
Create or consume the necessary APIs.
Implement backend business logic.
Integrate with external services when required.
Design or modify the necessary database structures.
Implement authentication and permissions.
Handle errors and edge cases.
Test the functionality.
Deploy and monitor the finished feature.
We want an engineer who understands the complete SaaS application lifecycle and takes ownership of delivering reliable, maintainable software—not someone limited to one layer of the stack.
What We Offer
Competitive monthly contractor compensation commensurate with experience.
Fully remote work environment.
Direct impact on software used by churches, ministries, and organizations.
Access to modern AI-assisted engineering tools.
Opportunity to work on new SaaS products and significant platform initiatives.
Ability to influence technical standards, development practices, and product architecture.
To Apply
- Please provide your resume and the following information:
- A brief summary of your experience building full-stack SaaS applications.
- Examples of relevant SaaS products, applications, or projects you have developed.
- Your experience with React, Next.js, TypeScript, backend/API development, databases, cloud infrastructure, and third-party integrations.
- Your experience using AI-assisted development tools such as Claude, Codex, Cursor, or GitHub Copilot.
- Your general availability and ability to work with a team operating during 8:30 AM–5:30 PM U.S. Eastern Time.
- Your expected monthly compensation in Philippine Pesos (PHP).
Application Question(s):
- Please provide your resume and the following information:
- A brief summary of your experience building full-stack SaaS applications.
- Examples of relevant SaaS products, applications, or projects you have developed.
- Your experience with React, Next.js, TypeScript, backend/API development, databases, cloud infrastructure, and third-party integrations.
- Your experience using AI-assisted development tools such as Claude, Codex, Cursor, or GitHub Copilot.
- Your general availability and ability to work with a team operating during 8:30 AM–5:30 PM U.S. Eastern Time.
- Your expected monthly compensation in Philippine Pesos (PHP).
Work Location: Remote
