Full Stack Software Developer Contract Jobs in Los Angeles, CA

Job Summary:
True Anomaly is a company focused on delivering decisive capabilities for space superiority. They are seeking a Staff Full Stack Software Engineer to lead the technical direction of their spacecraft modeling and ground control platform, bridging military objectives with software solutions.
Responsibilities:
• Lead and deliver large-scale, cross-functional initiatives that span the entire stack, aligning frontend experience, backend infrastructure, and system architecture with strategic company objectives, from technical vision through production deployment and long-term evolution
• Define and drive the full-stack technical roadmap and architectural strategy, establishing patterns, frameworks, and systems that enable the entire engineering organization to move faster across both React/TypeScript and Elixir codebases
• Serve as the primary technical decision-maker for cross-stack architecture, evaluating and adopting new technologies, defining the boundaries and contracts between frontend and backend systems, and establishing engineering standards that balance innovation with maintainability
• Proactively identify systemic technical debt, scalability challenges, and architectural limitations across the stack, then build business cases, secure buy-in, and lead multi-quarter initiatives to address them
• Elevate the engineering organization through technical mentorship, establishing best practices, leading design reviews, and developing the skills of senior, mid-level, and junior engineers across both frontend and backend disciplines
• Partner with executive leadership, product, design, space operations, and astrodynamics teams as a key technical stakeholder, influencing product strategy and company direction with a perspective that encompasses the entire technical surface
• Drive engineering efficiency and excellence by establishing metrics, tooling, and processes that improve code quality, system reliability, deployment velocity, and developer experience across the stack
• Build and maintain technical documentation, architectural decision records, and knowledge-sharing systems that scale organizational learning
• Represent the full-stack engineering perspective in strategic planning, resource allocation, and cross-company technical decisions Identify and develop emerging technical leaders within the team, creating growth pathways and opportunities for engineers to expand their impact across the stack
Qualifications:
Required:
• 12+ years of software development experience, with demonstrated expertise across both frontend and backend development
• Expert-level mastery of HTML/CSS and modern TypeScript/JavaScript, including deep understanding of performance optimization, browser internals, memory management, and runtime characteristics
• Deep expertise in modern React and the broader frontend ecosystem, including architectural patterns for large-scale applications, advanced state management, performance profiling and optimization, and emerging frontend technologies
• Expert-level mastery of Elixir and OTP, including deep understanding of BEAM internals, scheduling, memory management, garbage collection, process architecture, and runtime characteristics at scale
• Deep expertise in designing, building, and evolving large-scale distributed systems, including architectural patterns for fault tolerance, consistency, availability, clustering, and horizontal scalability
• Proven track record of establishing comprehensive testing strategies across the full stack, including unit, integration, property-based, and end-to-end, including championing testing culture and tooling adoption
• Extensive experience designing, building, and evolving component libraries, design systems, service architectures, and internal infrastructure that serve multiple teams and products
• Expert-level understanding of distributed systems integration patterns including gRPC, REST, WebSockets, and GraphQL, with experience defining API contracts and influencing architecture decisions across the stack
• History of leading technical initiatives in Git-based workflows, establishing code review standards, and fostering collaborative engineering culture
• U.S. Citizen and eligible for DoD Secret or TS/SCI clearance
Preferred:
• Bachelor’s degree in computer science or similar discipline
• Proven experience as a technical lead, staff engineer, or principal engineer on production systems with significant user bases and business-critical requirements, with responsibility spanning multiple layers of the stack
• Track record of leading large-scale migrations, architectural overhauls, or platform rewrites across frontend and backend systems while maintaining product velocity and system reliability
• Deep expertise building and optimizing complex, data-intensive applications with demanding performance requirements (real-time processing, large-scale datasets, complex visualizations, distributed systems) across the full stack
• Advanced proficiency with Three.js, React Three Fiber, WebGL, or other web-based 3D rendering technologies, including low-level performance optimization and shader programming
• Deep mastery of OTP including BEAM scheduling, GenServers, run queues, pg, the Actor model, dynamic supervisors, registries, distributed process groups, and custom OTP behaviours, with experience pushing the boundaries of the runtime
• Advanced experience with database design and optimization at scale, including PostgreSQL internals, replication strategies, and data modeling for distributed systems
• Extensive experience with monitoring, observability, and distributed tracing across the full stack, including designing observability strategies and incident response frameworks
• Experience bridging engineering and design through deep UI/UX collaboration, design systems development, and tools like Figma, able to influence design decisions with technical constraints and possibilities
• Experience in highly regulated industries (aerospace, defense, healthcare, finance) with understanding of compliance, security, and operational constraints
• Published technical writing, open source contributions, or conference speaking that demonstrates thought leadership
• Exceptional communication skills that enable you to influence technical and non-technical stakeholders at all levels of the organization
Company:
True Anomaly develops space security technologies, including spacecraft, software platforms, and mission systems for orbital operations. Founded in 2022, the company is headquartered in Centennial, USA, with a team of 201-500 employees. The company is currently Growth Stage.