HONK

HONK is seeking a Senior Software Engineer- Fullstack to help architect, build, and scale our core platform and customer-facing products. This role works closely with the CTO and engineering team to develop high-performance applications across the stack, including frontend experiences, backend services, APIs, and cloud infrastructure.

This is a hands-on role ideal for someone who enjoys solving complex technical problems, shipping quickly, and contributing to product and technical direction in a collaborative startup environment.
This position reports directly to the CTO and is expected to work from our Chicago office 3-5 days per week.

• Design, build, and maintain scalable full-stack applications and services.

• Develop responsive frontend applications using React and TypeScript.

• Build and enhance backend systems using Ruby on Rails and Java.

• Architect APIs, real-time systems, and high-throughput microservices, with a heavy focus on optimizing our core dispatch and logistics engine.

• Define testing and review practices, introducing automated frameworks into our release process to improve reliability.

• Improve platform scalability and reliability by anticipating scaling limits, raising reliability risks early, and improving system observability.

• Take ownership of a technical area and its downstream impacts, ensuring decisions align with product goals and do not negatively affect dependent systems or the business.

• Collaborate with Product, UX, and Engineering teams to ship customer-facing features.

• Support AI-enabled initiatives and automation efforts across internal tools and workflows.

• Mentor engineers, provide architectural guidance, and help drive engineering excellence across the team.

• 8+ years of experience building and shipping scalable web applications and distributed systems, ideally with experience preparing platforms for significant (3-5x) scale.

• Deep expertise in Ruby on Rails and Java (our core backend languages).

• Strong frontend engineering experience with modern JavaScript frameworks, particularly React and TypeScript.

• Demonstrated experience with AWS cloud infrastructure.

• Domain expertise in logistics, routing, mapping, or dispatch systems (familiarity with route optimization is a significant plus).

• A proven track record of establishing automated testing frameworks and CI/CD quality gates from scratch, rather than simply participating in an existing testing culture.

• Strong systems context awareness, demonstrating the ability to consider downstream effects across adjacent systems to avoid cascading failures.

• Experience contributing to operational excellence, including establishing observability metrics, monitoring, and proactive debugging of performance issues.

• Strong communication skills with the ability to facilitate discussions, clearly communicate technical trade-offs to non-technical stakeholders, and align teams on technical direction.

• Curiosity about emerging technologies and experience leveraging AI tools and workflows to improve development velocity.