Lead Full Stack Engineer

Genies is an AI avatar technology company powering the visual and embodiment layer for AI. Through the Genies SDK, their proprietary avatar framework brings AI to life as fully realized AI personas that look, think, behave, and play like living identities. Genies powers AI companion, NPC, and agent use cases across enterprise, consumer, creator, entertainment, and gaming. Genies has raised $200M from Silver Lake, BOND, and Bob Iger. Genies is built on the belief that every website, app, game, brand, and human will have an AI persona. OVERVIEW Genies is seeking a contract Lead Full Stack Engineer to guide the technical direction, architecture, and execution of our avatar-driven digital products. You'll be a player-coach — leading by example as a hands-on contributor while mentoring a team of talented engineers. Reporting directly to the Director of Software Engineering and Infrastructure, you'll drive technical excellence, champion engineering best practices, and ensure scalable, performant solutions across the stack. This is a high-impact role for an engineer who thrives on mentorship, system design, and building cohesive teams that ship complex, user-facing systems at the intersection of AI, game technology, and UGC creation tools. We move fast at Genies, and we expect our lead engineers to move fast with us — leveraging AI as a force multiplier while holding the bar on quality, clarity, and correctness.     WHAT YOU'LL BE DOING Technical Leadership — Define and own the architectural vision and implementation strategy for full-stack systems supporting Genies' Smart Avatar ecosystem. Establish technical standards, patterns, and scalable frameworks across both frontend and backend. Make opinionated choices on separation of concerns and push back on overengineering. AI-Augmented Development — Actively integrate AI tools into your development workflow for planning, code generation, debugging, and testing. Critically evaluate AI-generated output — catching complexity, duplication, or architectural drift before it takes root. Beyond your own practice, you'll champion AI adoption across the team: identifying opportunities where AI can reduce toil, accelerate delivery, and raise the quality bar. You'll share workflows, prompt strategies, and tooling discoveries that make the whole team faster — not just yourself. Hands-on Contribution — Contribute directly to the codebase with a focus on maintainability, reliability, and performance. Build intuitive, interactive user interfaces to a high frontend standard while also delivering robust APIs and backend services using technologies such as React, Next.js, TypeScript, Node.js, and Go. Mentorship & Team Development — Act as a player-coach for a growing team. Provide structured mentorship, code review guidance, and ongoing feedback that fosters career growth and engineering excellence. Cross-Functional Collaboration — Partner closely with product managers, designers, and other engineering teams to translate high-level goals into technical deliverables. Ask sharp questions during requirements gathering and translate ambiguity into clear implementation plans. Strategic Impact — Drive initiatives that improve developer velocity, operational efficiency, and code quality. Proactively identify technical risks, scalability challenges, and long-term architectural needs — including tradeoffs in distributed systems, CAP theorem considerations, and service design. Process & Culture Building — Champion best practices in code quality, security (OWASP Top Ten, OAuth 2.0), testing (TDD/automation coverage), and observability (alerting and monitoring). Help shape a culture of learning, accountability, and high ownership.     WHAT YOU SHOULD HAVE - 7+ years of professional full stack development experience, including at least 2 years in a technical leadership or mentorship role - Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, a related field, or equivalent practical experience - Proven ability to design and scale distributed, high-performance web applications - Expertise with modern web technologies: React, TypeScript/JavaScript (ES6+), Node.js, Next.js - Strong frontend sensibility — you care about usability, design patterns, and the details that make an interface feel right - Strong backend development experience with Go, Python, or similar languages - Fluency with NoSQL and relational database solutions - Experience building and consuming RESTful and GraphQL APIs; familiarity with event-driven architectures - Understanding of data pipelines and ETL patterns - Solid grasp of security fundamentals: OWASP Top Ten, OAuth 2.0 - Experience with cloud infrastructure (AWS) and CI/CD pipelines - Demonstrated AI workflow maturity — you use AI tools to increase output and can articulate when and how you apply them, not just that you do - Strong communication skills with the ability to lead both technical and non-technical discuss