Contract Software Engineer Optum Jobs in California

Job Description
Software Engineer, Korrus Engineering (AI-First) - Contract
Korrus • Reports to VP, Engineering • Remote (US, Pacific overlap preferred), occasional travel for in-person working sessions • Full-time • Early career welcome
About Korrus
Korrus is a lighting technology company built on more than 500 patents and co-founded by the Nobel laureate who invented the blue LED. Our consumer brand, OIO, delivers biologically aligned light, the right spectrum at the right time of day, to support how people wake, focus, and rest.
Behind the products is a real, complex company: engineering, manufacturing, a global supply chain, and the operations that tie it all together. All of it runs on software, and we are building that software in an AI-first way. We are looking for an unusually capable early-career engineer to help us do it.
The role
This is a broad, high-ownership contract software engineering role. You will build a wide range of software across Korrus, inside AI-assisted and agentic workflows that take an idea to working software far faster than a traditional process would. We are not looking for someone to pick up tickets and pass work downstream. We are looking for someone who co-creates with our team and with AI, in real time, and is genuinely excited to deepen that practice.
You do not need years of experience. You need to be sharp, self-directed, and eager to own real problems from day one.
How we see your first few weeks
We expect you to start with a learning phase: time to understand our systems, meet the people you will build for, and find the first problem worth solving. We would rather you scope work properly than rush to a fixed timeline. You will ship something early and grow quickly into owning problems end to end.
What you'll do
• Build software across Korrus, from internal tools to product surfaces, and take it from idea to working application.
• Co-work directly with our engineering team inside AI-assisted and agentic AI workflows.
• Take problems from a vague, one-paragraph description to something that works, largely on your own.
• Partner with the people who will use what you build, understand what they actually need, and make sure it gets used.
• Work across the stack and close to the data: backends, APIs, SQL, and a clean interface when one is needed.
• Help shape how we build as our AI-first engineering practice matures.
What we're looking for
• Solid computer science fundamentals. You understand data structures, algorithms, and how systems fit together, and you reason about a problem before you code it.
• Strong Python, and comfort being a generalist across the stack rather than boxed into one layer.
• The ability to work from ambiguity. You can get moving without a detailed spec and turn a fuzzy problem into working software.
• Genuine fluency with modern AI coding tools, and real curiosity about using AI to build faster. You want to learn more, not less.
• Comfort with mess: real-world data, and systems that were never designed to talk to each other.
• The ability to sit with someone who is not an engineer, understand what they need, and earn their trust. You care about the outcome, not just the code.
• A bias to finish. You ship, you follow through, and you make sure the thing you built actually gets used.
• The ability to work independently and make sound decisions with limited direction.
Strong pluses
• Internships, personal projects, hackathons, or open source where you shipped something real people used.
• Experience with any of: data pipelines, workflow automation, cloud (AWS), business or ERP systems, or mobile.
• A track record of building things on your own initiative.
Logistics and compensation
• Contract engagement - full-time hours, remote (US), with meaningful overlap with Pacific working hours.
• Occasional travel for in-person working sessions.
• $8,000 - $9,500 per month depending on experience.
• Early career welcome - recent graduates through approximately 3-4 years of experience encouraged to apply.
To be considered
Send us your resume and, in two or three sentences, tell us about something you built end to end and what was hard about it. We are especially interested in anything you have built using AI tools. Finalists may be asked to complete a short, paid exercise so we can see how you work.
All qualified applicants will receive equal consideration for employment without regard to race, color, national origin, religion, sex, pregnancy, marital status, sexual orientation, gender identity, age, physical or mental disability, or covered veteran status.
Sponsorship is not available for this position.