Staff Engineer – AI-Native Commerce

Where We Are Today

8-figure ARR growing 100%+ YoY

Strong unit economics and efficient growth

Rapid merchant adoption and expanding market presence

Backed by experienced operators and investors with a history of building and scaling successful businesses

Why Now

This is a rare opportunity for a technical leader to step into a company with proven revenue, product-market fit, an established team, and a large market opportunity.

Three things make this an inflection point:

1. Product-market fit is established. Demand continues to grow, merchant adoption is accelerating, and Phoenix is outperforming expectations.

2. There is an opportunity to define a category. While many companies are building AI tools for commerce, few are focused on helping sophisticated DTC operators automate revenue-generating decisions at scale.

3. Our customers are AI-ready. They adopt technology quickly when it drives measurable business outcomes, creating an ideal environment for agentic products.

The Role

We are hiring a Staff Engineer to put AI at the core of Phoenix's storefront platform.

The immediate focus is our AI agent, beginning with copy-site, our flagship feature. You will make that agent exceptional, build the agents that come after it, and push the AI-native engineering system our team uses to ship software even further.

This is a force-multiplier role. You will own multiple technical domains, make architecture decisions, write production code, and use AI to accomplish work that historically required an entire engineering team.

You will work directly with the Engineering Lead who owns Storefronts and a Principal Product Lead driving product vision.

The hardest infrastructure problems across payments and checkout are already solved and process millions in GMV every day. Building on that foundation, you will create the next layer: a storefront system where merchants and AI agents collaborate to create, deploy, and optimize landing pages, advertorials, and complete storefront experiences.

This is not a role where you architect from a distance. You will design systems, write code, ship critical paths, and own outcomes.

What You'll Own

Own AI Agents and Evals

Take Phoenix's copy-site and AI editing capabilities from impressive to trusted.

Design the agent's tools and execution loop, determine where merchants should confirm actions before execution, and build the evals, tracing, observability, and cost tracking required to prove that changes improve the system.

Harden and expand Phoenix's MCP infrastructure and create new tool surfaces that allow agents to reliably build and modify pages, sections, components, styles, and data bindings.

Build evaluation systems against real commerce experiences so regressions are identified before merchants encounter them.

Build Autonomous Product Systems

Build the infrastructure that allows AI agents to generate storefront experiences, validate them against quality gates, deploy them, measure their performance, and continuously optimize them using conversion data.

Design autonomous workflows with the appropriate contracts, guardrails, verification, and human checkpoints so agents can operate reliably in production.

Own System Design and Architecture

Design the APIs, data models, service boundaries, and technical architecture behind Phoenix's AI-native storefront platform.

Work alongside the Engineering Lead to make pragmatic architecture decisions across TypeScript/Node.js services, React applications, Postgres, MongoDB, Redis, and related systems.

Balance rapid execution with architectural decisions that will continue to work as Phoenix scales.

Advance AI-Native Engineering

Phoenix's development loop already runs on agents. Coding agents write changes, review and verification agents validate them, and automated pipelines run checks and ship production code.

You will work this way from day one: writing specifications agents can execute, running agents in parallel, reviewing and verifying their output, and continuously improving the development system itself.

Build leverage that extends beyond your own output through custom agents, skills, hooks, MCP servers, automated verification, and AI-assisted development infrastructure.

Drive Technical Quality

Raise the verification bar for code written by both engineers and agents.

Build deterministic fixtures, Playwright E2E testing, golden-file rendering tests, integration tests against real services, visual regression systems, and automated quality gates.

Own observability, tracing, SLOs, and operational reliability for the systems you build.

Author ADRs, RFCs, and technical specifications and lead design and code reviews that improve engineering quality across the organization.

What We're Looking For

Required

• 8+ years building production web platforms, including Staff-level impact as an architect and hands-on builder across multiple systems or technical domains.

• Real experience building production systems with LLMs and agents, including areas such as tool calling, schema-constrained generation, agent orchestration, autonomous workflows, or agentic SDKs.

• Experience proving that agentic systems work through evals, tracing, observability, regression testing, and/or cost and performance measurement.

• Demonstrated AI-native engineering practices. You use coding agents as part of your normal development workflow and understand how to write specifications, parallelize agent work, and rigorously verify generated output.

• Experience building leverage through custom agents, skills, hooks, MCP servers, AI code review, or similar AI-assisted engineering infrastructure.

• Expert-level TypeScript and Node.js.

• Strong full-stack engineering fundamentals across API design, data modeling, testing, distributed systems, and production operations.

• Experience working with relational, document, and caching systems such as Postgres, MongoDB, and Redis.

• Strong understanding of production reliability, including observability, tracing, SLOs, incident response, and operating the systems you build.

• Strong written technical communication, including ADRs, RFCs, and technical specifications.

• High ownership and builder mentality. Comfortable taking ambiguous problems from architecture through production without waiting for detailed requirements.

Preferred

• Experience in ecommerce, storefronts, DTC, direct response, payments, or other transaction-heavy product environments.

• Experience with Shopify, Liquid, or other commerce platforms and templating systems.

• Experience building page-builder, CMS, or other content-authoring infrastructure.

• Experience building high-performance rendering systems including SSR, streaming, templating engines, or CDN-backed delivery.

• Experience designing or operating MCP systems in production.

• Experience with browser automation and visual comparison at scale, including Playwright, headless Chrome, screenshot comparison, or vision-model scoring.

• Experience building autonomous deployment, testing, or optimization systems.

• Experience with advanced caching strategies such as edge workers, cache tags, or surrogate keys.

• NestJS experience.

• Contributions to open-source infrastructure, AI tooling, or developer tooling projects.

Leadership Traits We Value

High ownership

Decisiveness

Strong recruiting and talent development capabilities

Accountability

Product judgment

Calm under pressure

Builder mentality

Culture

These are the values that guide how we operate:

All In to Win — Operate with urgency, intensity, and a relentless bar for excellence. 

A Players Only — Only hire, develop, and keep A players. Protect talent density. 

Merchant First — Merchants are why we exist. Every decision measured by merchant impact. 

Entrepreneurial Spirit — Move like a Day One company. Fast, scrappy, hungry. Everyone owns. 

Execution Over Ego — Best ideas win regardless of source. Status and titles do not matter.