Full Stack Engineer
Confirmed on the employer's own hiring board on Nov 4, 2026. First seen by Alion on Oct 20, 2026.
About us
Different is a marketing system that runs demand generation for B2B companies. It handles campaign creation, personalization, and optimization in one place, so lean teams can do more without adding headcount, agencies or point AI solutions. Customers use Different to launch campaigns faster, reach the right buyers, and continuously improve marketing ROI. Between them, Different’s founders have founded two unicorns, led AI at a global marketing software giant, and built platforms used by millions. They bring deep product, technical, and business experience to one shared goal: reimagining how modern marketing works. We are backed by General Catalyst and Lightspeed.
The role
You'll own a large, customer-facing part of the product: how it's designed, how it's built, and how well it holds up once marketers depend on it. You'll make the technical decisions for that area, work with our Applied AI engineers on the agents and model systems behind it, and help earlier-career engineers do their best work.This is not a role for engineers who want to stay specialists in one language or one layer, for example Java-only or Go-only. The work spans the whole stack and changes from week to week.
What you'll work on
Product areas: own one or more areas end to end, from technical design to performance and reliability in production.
Customer problems: work with customers and customer-facing teams to decide what to build, and check after launch that it worked.
AI features as systems: build retrieval, tool use and agents where they fit, plus monitoring and fallbacks for when the model gets it wrong.
Evals: define evals for open-ended problems and scenarios, and use them to decide when a prompt, model or agent change is ready to ship.
Scope and trade-offs: shape scope with product and design, push back when a simpler version would reach customers sooner, and choose when to build, buy or use an existing service.
Quality and mentoring: set the bar in your area through code review, testing and design docs, and pair with earlier-career engineers on hard problems.
What we're looking for
- 3-6 years building and shipping web products, with real ownership of systems customers rely on.
- Depth on both frontend and backend, for example TypeScript, React, a Node or Python backend, document or SQL databases, and cloud infrastructure.
- Examples of technical decisions you made, the alternatives you rejected, and how they played out.
- Hands-on experience shipping at least one LLM-powered feature to real users.
- Time on a team known for its bar in experience, quality, reliability or scale, and the practices you brought away from it.
- Curiosity about what's changing in AI: you try new models and tools soon after they come out and have good judgment about which are worth adopting.
Relevant experience may include:
- Working knowledge of Claude Code, Codex or Cursor.
- B2B products, including permissions, multi-tenancy, audit logs or integrations.
- Observability for AI features in production.
- Being an early engineer at a startup.
You don't need any marketing or advertising experience, but you'll need to learn the domain quickly, including how marketers think about audiences and campaigns and what happens after a campaign launches.
Why this is interesting
Most LLM features stop once the model returns an answer. Different keeps going: it decides what to do, acts across channels, sees what happened and adjusts. You'll shape how that loop shows up for marketers, including what they see, approve and come to trust.
The hard part is keeping it dependable as models, ad platforms and customer data change underneath it.
Annual compensation range
$150k-$270k
Actual compensation will depend on the candidate's experience, skills and the scope of the role. In addition to base salary, Different offers equity and benefits.
Logistics
San Francisco, CA
Full-time
5 days/week in office