Senior Full Stack Software Engineer

Company Overview:

We are building Protege to solve the biggest unmet need in AI - getting access to the right training data. The process today is time intensive, incredibly expensive, and often ends in failure. The Protege platform facilitates the secure, efficient, and privacy-centric exchange of AI training data.

Solving AI’s data problem is a generational opportunity. We’re backed by world-class investors and already powering partnerships with some of the most ambitious teams in AI. The company that succeeds will be one of the largest in AI - and in tech.

We’re a lean, fast-moving, high-trust team of builders who are obsessed with velocity and impact. Our culture is built for people who thrive on ambiguity, own outcomes, and want to shape the future of data and AI.

About the Role

Protege is hiring a Senior Software Engineer for our Presentation team, the squad that builds the surfaces where Protege's data catalog meets the people who use it. That means two products: the internal dashboard our team uses to catalog, curate, package datasets, and the customer portal where AI labs browse, stream, and evaluate content before they license it.

This is a product engineering role in a TypeScript and Next.js codebase. You'll talk directly with the people who use what you build, design the interfaces yourself, and ship the whole feature: UI, API, data model, and tests. The datasets behind these screens are large and multimodal (video, audio, motion capture, documents, medical imaging), so a lot of the craft is making that volume feel fast, legible, and good to use in a browser.

As a senior engineer, you'll take on the largest and most ambiguous initiatives on the team: the ones that span both apps, cross into other squads' services, or need someone to figure out what the right product even is before building it. You'll partner with the team lead on direction and priorities, lead design on complex workflows, and raise the bar for everyone shipping in this codebase. This role is ideal for product engineers who want to design what they build, talk to the people who use it, and own features end to end.

What You’ll Do:

• Lead the team's larger initiatives from discovery through design, build, and rollout, such as search previews at catalog scale or the presentation of a new content modality
• Talk directly with the partnerships, solutions, and sales teams who use what you build; understand the business context behind each request and bring that view back to the team's priorities
• Design complex workflows and data-heavy interfaces yourself: information hierarchy, interaction patterns, and every state a screen can be in
• Build the workflows our partnerships and solutions teams use every day: sample creation, customer access management, and delivery exports
• Build the customer-facing experience for browsing, streaming, and evaluating multimodal samples
• Make large multimodal datasets feel instant in a browser: streaming playback, previews, lazy loading, and export at scale
• Build UI on top of embedding-based search so users can find the right clips within catalogs of millions
• Decide what runs client-side, in a route handler, or in a backend service, and work with our data teams when the answer crosses squad boundaries
• Handle sensitive data correctly: scoped access, secure share links, and PHI-aware routes
• Set the bar for quality on the squad: testing, performance, design consistency, and UX detail
• Lead design discussions, review code, and unblock other engineers
• Turn repeated one-off UI and workflow patterns into reusable components in our shared design system

What Success Looks Like:

30 days: Learn and Build Relationships

• Get productive in the codebase and ship your first improvements to both apps
• Build a working map of the presentation stack: the two apps, the services behind them, and how content flows from ingestion to a customer's screen
• Meet the partnerships, solutions, and data teams; understand how the catalog gets licensed and delivered, and where the current tooling slows a deal down

60 days: Develop and Cultivate

• Take a major feature or workflow from ambiguous ask to shipped, including its design
• Start raising the bar on quality, design consistency, and performance across the squad's code
• Become the engineer others come to when they're stuck in the presentation layer

90 days: Make an Impact

• Lead a significant initiative end to end, from talking to the people who need it through design, build, and rollout
• Identify at least one leverage opportunity (a reusable component, an architectural improvement, a workflow that should be self-serve) and drive it
• Have a visible effect on how the team ships: patterns adopted, reviews that teach, fewer things falling through cracks

What You Bring:

Must Haves

• 5+ years building production web applications that real users depend on
• Deep TypeScript and React experience, with Next.js or a comparable full-stack framework in production
• You've shipped user-facing features end to end: UI, API, data model, and tests
• Strong design judgment: you can design a complex workflow yourself, hold a bar for visual and interaction detail, and articulate why one UI decision beats another
• Solid backend fundamentals: API design, Postgres, auth and permission modeling, and cloud services (we use AWS)
• You've built data-heavy or media-heavy interfaces and know how to keep them fast: streaming, pagination, caching, and knowing what not to load
• You've worked directly with the users of what you build and let that shape what you shipped
• Attention to detail without losing speed, and a bias to action
• Curious and proactive

Nice to Haves

• Experience with media playback in the browser (HTML5 video/audio, HLS, containers and codecs)
• Experience building UX over embeddings or vector search
• A portfolio, side projects, or shipped work that shows your design taste
• Experience building or maintaining a design system across multiple apps
• Familiarity with auth systems (we use Clerk) and permission modeling
• Experience working with sensitive or regulated data (HIPAA, PHI)
• Prior startup experience as a founding or early engineer

Protege Values

Pass the Loved Ones’ Test

We act with integrity and do the right thing - especially when it’s hard and no one is watching.

Always Find a Way

We are resourceful, resilient builders who solve hard problems and push through obstacles.

Go Fast and Grow Fast

Velocity matters. We move with urgency, learn quickly, and continuously improve as individuals and as a company.

Practice Kindness and Candor

We communicate directly and respectfully, building trust through honest feedback and genuine care for one another.

Deliver Together

We win as one team. Collaboration, accountability, and shared ownership drive our success.

Own the Outcome. Hone the Craft.

We take pride in our work, sweat the details, and continuously raise the bar for excellence.