Staff Engineer (Front end)

Position: Staff Engineer (Frontend)

Reports to: Fractional CPTO

Start date: October 2025

Location: NYC strongly preferred; remote eligible, ability to travel to NYC 4-6 times/year, required

Salary Range: $130,000-$163,000

ABOUT BASTA

First-generation college students have what it takes to bring immense value to the workforce, but often face systemic barriers in professional knowledge, networks, and opportunity. More than half of recent grads are underemployed, with most projected to remain underemployed 10+ years after graduation. Basta is closing the employment gap for first-generation students, enabling them to secure great jobs, launch careers, and change the face of leadership in the workforce.

Since 2016, we have built innovative, data-driven solutions ensuring students convert their hard-earned degrees into a great first job. Through AI-enabled, personalized career preparation and partnerships with top employers, we are accelerating the professional journey of thousands of first-gen students at 300 campuses…and counting! Basta participants are now thriving in their first jobs at Bloomberg, Snap Inc., Citi, DonorsChoose, and over 100 other companies.

ABOUT THE STAFF ENGINEER ROLE

As Basta’s first Staff Engineer hire, you’ll step into a pivotal role shaping the user experience of our AI-powered Seekr Adaptive platform — the product at the heart of our mission to close opportunity gaps for first-generation college students.

As our Staff Engineer (Frontend), this is the most senior frontend engineering role at Basta to date. You’ll be hands-on in building complex, user-facting systems and driving technical excellence in React, Next.js, TypeScript, and Tailwind. With strong contract principal engineers in place on backend and infrastructure, we’re looking for someone who brings deep expertise in frontend engineering. You’ll ensure our platform delivers polished, performant, and scalable user experiences, and you’ll model what excellence looks like across design, code quality, and architectural thinking.

This is a high-leverage, hands-on role focused on technical execution, systems thinking, and design leadership. You’ll spend most of your time designing and shipping code, setting patterns, and solving thorny technical challenges that improve product velocity and user experience. While you’ll naturally support and mentor others through design reviews and pairing, the emphasis is on direct technical impact rather than heavy leadership responsibilities.

You will do this by:

• Build and ship: Take ownership of major frontend features and platform milestones — from high-level design to production-ready code.
• Front-end leadership: Set patterns and standards for React, Next.js, TypeScript, and Tailwind development to launch delightful user experience that is accessible, performant, and scalable.
• Architect for growth: Design component patterns, data flows, and frontend infrastructure that scale as the product and team expand.
• Leverage AI tools: Utilize AI-assisted development tools (Claude and Cursor) to enhance productivity while upholding high engineering standards.
• Collaborate across functions: Partner closely with product, design, data and other engineers to de-risk complex initiatives, clarify milestones, and ensure alignment.
• Mentor & elevate: Sharing expertise with mid- and junior-level engineers through thoughtful design & code reviews, pairing, and documentation.
• Drive innovation: Contribute to AI-native features such as LLM-powered workflows, agentic tools, and vector search, while helping define the guardrails for reliable, responsible integration.

SUCCESS IN STAFF ENGINEER ROLE LOOKS LIKE:

Success in this role means delivering user experience that is delightful, scalable, and reliable for our users — and setting the standard for how engineering gets done at Basta. You’ll make the product shine through execution, patterns, and craft, while helping the team move faster and more confidently.

• You own the technical delivery of major frontend milestones, turning designs into polished, production-ready experiences.
• You reduce unnecessary complexity and boost team productivity by introducing reusable, composable patterns
• The engineering team moves faster and with more clarity because of your influence.
• Our front-end stack is modern, performant, and scalable, with reusable, composable patterns that reduce unnecessary complexity.
• You ensure design fidelity and pixel-perfect delivery across browsers and devices, meeting performance metrics, accessibility standards, and responsive layouts.
• You elevate peers through code reviews, pairing, and documentation that make everyone better.

YOU COULD BE OUR STAFF ENGINEER IF:

You’re a senior individual contributor who thrives on solving complex frontend problems and setting high standards through your craft. You bring depth in modern web technologies and prefer to lead through execution and expertise rather than authority.

• You bring 8–10+ years of frontend engineering experience in product-led growth teams, with a track record of delivering complex, user-facing systems.
• You have deep expertise in modern frontend development (React, Next.js, TypeScript, Tailwind) and Saas products or customer-facing web applications.
• You’re fluent inJavaScript, HTML5, CSS3, and responsive and adaptive design.
• You’re fluent in React, Next.js, TypeScript, and cloud-native frontend deployment solutions (AWS, S3, CloudFront - CDN)
• You’ve led initiatives where user experience, frontend quality, cross-browser support, scalability, performance, responsiveness, and accessibility standards were mission-critical
• You’ve shipped production features powered by AI/LLMs or have architected data-rich, interactive systems.
• You thrive in environments where you can go deep technically while also shaping team culture, and you’re motivated by work that creates real social impact.

The Tangible Good

Basta is a remote-first hybrid organization. We offer a competitive compensation and benefits package* which includes medical, dental, vision, short-term disability, long-term disability, life insurance, retirement matching, paid parental leave, and more. We also offer a generous paid time off policy, including 15 paid vacation days (20 paid vacation days after your first year), all federal holidays, summer Friday half-days and an end of year shutdown annually.

• Basta reserves the right to change benefits at any time according to business need.
• *Applicants must be authorized to work for any employer in the U.S. Basta is unable to sponsor or take over sponsorship of an employment Visa at this time.
• *Basta does not currently cover the cost of relocation.