Early Career Software Engineer
Boston, MA (Hybrid) · $110,000–$130,000 + Equity
Xenia is a Series A, AI-powered operations platform for multi-location businesses: restaurants, retail chains, convenience stores, and hospitality groups. We help the people who run these places do their jobs better: consistent execution, real-time visibility, and less time on paper and spreadsheets.
We're building a small, high-ownership engineering team in Boston. We move fast and care deeply about the quality of our output.
The role
You'll be engineer #3 in our Boston hub, working closely in person (hybrid) with our CTO and our founding engineer. From day one you'll be writing code that runs in production and directly impacts real customers. You'll participate in our on-call rotation roughly once a month, building an in-depth understanding of our systems by helping strengthen and maintain the team's operational excellence.
We expect this role to grow significantly along with the company; your work now will have quantifiable years-long impact on revenue, customer retention, and future growth.
What we're looking for
- High autonomy with a desire to learn; you may not know everything about tech yet, but you can maintain forward velocity, can figure things out on your own, and can yell when you're blocked.
- A genuine interest in software as a craft; we believe that the best engineers are ones who treat software like a puzzle to be solved and understood, rather than as an unknowable black box.
- Comfort with production. You care whether the thing you shipped works for real, not just whether the code looks right and the unit tests pass; you want to understand how things break and why.
- AI-native. You use, or are willing to use, LLMs and coding agents as a core part of how you perform coding work. You understand that LLMs are a tool to be steered by high-quality human operators, rather than a drop-in replacement for human judgement and taste.
- Boston-based and excited for hybrid in-person collaboration with, and learning from, our strong engineering talent.
Our stack
- Node/TypeScript/React on the existing product; server-side-rendered Go for new services
- AWS: ECS, RDS, EC2, S3, etc.
- Agent harnesses including Claude and Pi
This role would be a bad fit for you if...
- You want structured onboarding with lots of handholding
- You're looking for a large team with clear pre-set roles and responsibilities
- You'd rather work on well-understood domains, with clear instruction and handholding, than figure things out for yourself and make novel contributions to brand-new customer problems.
- You're not comfortable being on-call or owning incidents end to end
- You're overly reliant on AI for collaboration, dropping obviously LLM-authored PR descriptions, code comments, Slack DMs, etc. on your peers without taking a strong editing pass.
What you get
- Real ownership and impactful technical work from week one.
- Early-stage equity at a recently post-Series A startup.
- Direct access to technical leadership with strong opinions and high standards; our CTO is ex-Stripe, and our founding engineer is ex-Hubspot.
- A small team where your individual output is visible and valued; this role will have a disproportionately large seat at the table compared to equivalent roles at other companies.
- Hybrid flexibility within the Boston area.
