Lead Full-Stack Engineer

Founding Engineer — Architecture & Scale

Location: US Remote (Austin based preferred)
Reports to: Founder/CEO
Compensation: $95K-$130K plus equity

 

Why this role exists

Radius is a midterm-stay marketplace built for three audiences that have been ignored by the rest of the travel stack: traveling professionals, relocations, and the insurance housing companies placing displaced policyholders. We have a working product, paying customers, an active pilot with a major insurance housing company, and a clear path to a platform that handles 100k+ listings and thousands of monthly bookings.

You'll work directly with the founders — small room, fast loop, no layers. You set architectural direction, write the code, and stay deep in the product. This is a builder seat, not a manager seat. If your favorite version of the job is being the person who turns "this is going to break at 10x" into "we shipped the thing that makes 10x boring," keep reading.

Note: founders have deep experience in Proptech, PE, & Consulting along with 2 years+ owning a corporate housing business.

What you'll actually work on

Our stack today: Django 5.1 + DRF on Postgres 16, React 19 / Vite / Tailwind on the frontend, Stripe Connect for payments. It works. It also has roughly six interesting problems standing between us and the next order of magnitude — and you'd own them:

Search & discovery. Today it's Leaflet / Mapbox + Supercluster. Tomorrow it's a real geo-query layer — PostGIS, an actual search index (OpenSearch or similar), and map interactions that stay smooth at 100k pins.

 

Async infrastructure. Webhooks and long-running work currently block request threads. We need a real queue (Celery, RQ, Temporal — your call to make) and the discipline around it.

 

Calendar consistency. Per-property availability has to reconcile cleanly across OTA drift and direct bookings. Locking, idempotency, and the kind of invariants you can sleep on.

 

Payments & payouts. Multi-installment models on Stripe Connect, ledgered states, replayable webhooks, clean reconciliation. The kind of system where "eventually consistent" is not a punchline.

 

Multi-tenant performance. Insurance housing and partnership accounts drive uneven, bursty load. Query patterns, permissions, and rate-limiting need to flex with them.

 

Observability & CI/CD. Structured logging, real pipelines, the standard for how we ship. You set the bar.

 

You'll also help shape what we build, not just how. Founders here ship code; you'll be in product calls, customer calls, and the room where decisions actually get made.

What we're looking for

6+ years building production backends. Bonus weight if you've shipped a marketplace, booking system, or payments platform through a real growth inflection — and lived to tell the story.

 

Django + Postgres at depth. Partitioning, indexing strategy, connection pooling, the boring stuff that matters at scale.

 

Event-driven instincts. Async systems, idempotent consumers, high-volume webhook ingestion — and an opinion about when not to reach for them.

 

Full-stack range. You don't need to live in React, but you can read it, integrate with it, and ship a feature end-to-end without a handoff.

 

Pragmatism. A bias for the simplest thing that survives 10x. You delete code as enthusiastically as you write it.

 

AI-native. Comfortable building agents and AI-driven workflows where they actually move the needle — and skeptical of where they don't.

Nice to have

PostGIS or other serious geospatial work.

Stripe Connect platform-level edge cases (the ones that don't show up until month four).

OTA / channel-manager integrations — Hospitable, Guesty, etc.

Terraform / Pulumi, AWS or GCP at production scale.

How to apply

Send a note to [email protected]. Tell us about your background and one system you scaled through a similar inflection — what was actually hard, and what you'd do differently now. Then tell us which of the four big risks (Search, Async, Calendar, Payments) you'd attack first, and why.

We read every one.