Senior Software Engineer
Confirmed on the employer's own hiring board on Oct 17, 2026. First seen by Alion on May 4, 2026. Babylist scores A on the Alion truth index.
What The Role Is
As a Senior Engineer at Babylist, you take on hard problems and own them end-to-end. Millions of families depend on what we build. Agents write most of the code now. So the hard part is yours: what to build, how it should work and whether what shipped was right. You're still in the code for the genuinely hard problems. Agents handle the volume. You spend your time on the parts that need a person.
We're building well beyond the registry now: the financial side of raising a kid, maternal health made simpler and more human, the education new parents are looking for and the community around them. The hard problems run across all of it, plus the platform underneath and the AI we already ship to families. You'll start on a team, but you won't be boxed into it. The roadmap is open, your scope grows as you do and you have a say in what you take on next. Senior here means owning whole problems; Staff is the next step up, setting direction across a domain.
What You'll Own
A Senior Engineer here owns problems, not just features. You're handed an outcome, you decide what to build, ship it and own whether it worked. You act on incomplete information and change course fast when the evidence says you were wrong.
What you do depends on what the team needs:
- Frame the problem with your PM as a peer, run the experiment and bring customer evidence into what gets built.
- Harden a critical path, kill a class of incidents or design the abstraction your team builds on.
- Be the reviewer people want on the risky changes.
- Manage up with crisp choices: raise the risks early and protect the right tradeoffs.
- Share what you're learning about AI openly, so the whole team gets sharper.
A few problems people at this level are working on right now:
- Deciding what the registry recommends to each family, from the ranking to the model behind it, and proving in a live experiment that it actually helps.
- Building the evals system that catches our AI support agent making things up before a customer does.
- Making a child's info one source of truth instead of five disconnected flows, so parents set it up once and new products like Early Investor build on it.
Who You Are
You've been shipping production systems for years, and you've got the judgment to show for it. You can pick up an ambiguous problem and start moving before anyone hands you the full picture.
The strongest Senior engineers here are generalists, and usually the most prolific builders on their team. You go wherever the problem leads: a backend service one week, a stubborn frontend bug the next, the data pipeline after that. When it's hard you dig in, and you learn unfamiliar parts of the stack fast. Range is the Senior signature.
Compensation
We post real numbers. For a US-based Senior Engineer, the starting base salary range is $202,200 to $251,700, plus a target annual bonus of 15 percent of base. That's total target cash of roughly $232,530 to $289,455. On top of that you get meaningful equity and a 401(k) match. Where you start in that range depends on your experience, and your pay grows from there with performance and scope.
How We Build
AI is the default here. Engineers run agentic sessions for most of the work, and a lot of the interesting engineering now lives in the scaffolding that makes the agents good: the eval harnesses, the curated context, custom review skills and fast CI. Agents also triage incidents and handle a big share of support. A human always owns the outcome. The architecture is intentionally simple: one Rails monolith, MySQL and few moving parts. That's deliberate. Simple infrastructure lets us move fast and lets AI reason about the whole system, so the hardest problems are the ones in front of customers.
The Stack
- Core app: Rails, Packwerk, React, TypeScript, Sidekiq
- Mobile: iOS (Swift), Android (Kotlin)
- Data, search & events: MySQL, Snowflake, dbt, Airflow, Weaviate, WarpStream, Hex, Sigma
- Machine learning: deep learning, matrix factorization, retrieval & ranking, AWS SageMaker, MLflow
- AI & dev tooling: Claude Code, Devin, Linear, CodeRabbit, Warden, LangChain, Bedrock AgentCore, Maxim
- Infra & ops: AWS, Kubernetes, Terraform, GitHub Actions, Datadog, incident.io, LaunchDarkly
- Key integrations: Shopify (payments), Iterable (CRM)
Why Babylist
An engineer, expecting her first baby, couldn't find the registry she wanted. So she built it. That's how Babylist started, and it's still how we work: engineers solving problems for families. Becoming a parent is one of the biggest moments in a person's life. Millions reach it for the first time every year, making thousands of decisions and figuring it out as they go. That's who we build for, and we're a long way from done.
Ten million people give gifts through Babylist every year. We did more than $750M in revenue in 2025, up 45 percent over the year before, and we've been profitable for eight years while staying independent. So you can take on a hard, multi-year problem without watching over your shoulder for the next round or the next correction. And the team is small, around 65 engineers, so what you ship stays visible and your scope stays wide.
How We Work
Remote-first across the US and Canada, and we have been for years. That's not changing. We trust you to own your time and your outcomes, and we get everyone in a room together twice a year. Teams are small, pods of three to five engineers, so nothing you ship disappears into a committee. You'll work shoulder to shoulder with product, design and data, and with the partners across the business who rely on what you ship. You'll also stay close to customers yourself: sitting in on user interviews, watching session recordings, riding along with support. Here that's part of the engineering job, on a regular basis.
How We Hire
Three rounds, usually two to three weeks, start to finish.
- Recruiter conversation (30 minutes). Trade context: what you want next, what we're building and straight answers on comp, team and remote.
- Technical screen (1 hour). One round, no AI, language-agnostic. Reach for Google when you normally would. We just want to see how you reason from first principles.
- Final round (4 hours). Four one-hour interviews: system design, AI-assisted coding with the tools you'd actually use here, product sense and culture and values. You'll hear back either way within 24 to 48 hours.
If your timeline is tight, tell us and we'll move faster.
Benefits
- Company-paid medical and fully covered dental and vision
- A 401(k) match
- Generous paid parental leave for birthing and non-birthing parents, plus a gradual return-to-work program
- Winter Wonder Week, a paid company-wide week off at the end of the year
- A remote-work stipend
- Mental-health and wellness support
A Few Things To Know
- We record and transcribe interviews to evaluate candidates, in line with applicable privacy laws.
- We expect you to use AI in your work and we welcome it in the process, but what you submit and say should reflect your own thinking.
- If you have a family member or close relationship with a Babylist employee, let your recruiter know.
- Official outreach only ever comes from an @babylist.com address.