Full-Stack Software Engineer (Node.js)

Compensation: 0.1% – 0.25%

About us

Material Retail builds the point-of-sale and operations platform that independent retailers actually run their businesses on — inventory, orders, payments, reporting, and the dozens of integrations that tie a modern store together. We're a stable, growing company that just announced a major partnership with a major sales partner, and we're investing in the product and the team behind it.

We're small, which means the work you do is visible, the decisions you make matter, and the features you ship reach real merchants quickly.

The role

You'll work directly alongside our two-person core engineering team to design, build, and ship features across our platform — a microservices Node.js codebase (Hapi.js APIs, Sequelize/PostgreSQL, Google PubSub, PM2) with a React/Redux frontend.

This is a build-and-own role. We're looking for someone who can take a problem from a rough idea to a shipped, working feature without hand-holding — scoping it, building it, testing it, and getting it out the door.

Projects you might own in your first year

• Third-party integrations — e.g., syncing gift cards with Shopify, or building a Faire integration to sync wholesale orders into the platform
• Sales tax enhancements to keep merchants compliant as they grow
• Stripe billing integrations for subscription and payment flows
• Inventory counting tools that make stock-takes faster and less painful for store staff …and plenty more — we don't run out of interesting problems

Who you are

• You ship. You can take a project to completion independently and deliver it end-to-end.
• You thrive in a startup — comfortable with ambiguity, fast iteration, and wearing multiple hats.
• You have an entrepreneurial, ownership mindset — you think about the business outcome, not just the ticket.
• You're not afraid to talk to customers. You see talking to merchants as the fastest way to build the right thing, not a distraction from coding.
• You write simple, clean, maintainable code and value readability over cleverness.

Requirements

• Strong proficiency in JavaScript/Node.js and building backend services
• Comfortable with relational databases (PostgreSQL) and an ORM (we use Sequelize) Experience building or consuming REST APIs and integrating with third-party services (payments, webhooks, OAuth, etc.) Solid front-end skills with a modern framework (we use React/Redux) Sound grasp of Git and collaborative development workflows Able to debug across a distributed system and reason about data flow between services Available during our core hours, 12:00–3:00 PM ET, every workday (otherwise flexible)

Nice to have

• Experience with retail, e-commerce, or ERP systems
• Familiarity with payments/billing (Stripe), messaging (Twilio/SendGrid), or accounting (QuickBooks) integrations
• Experience with microservices, message queues (PubSub/Kafka), or event-driven architecture
• Exposure to sales tax / compliance tooling
• Experience with iOS development with Swift / an interest in learning None of these are dealbreakers — if you're a strong engineer who learns fast, we'll get you up to speed.

Why join

Equity — you'll share in the upside you help build A stable and profitable company with real revenue, real customers, and fresh momentum from our recent partnership with PayBright merchant services. Real ownership — small team, big surface area, your work ships and matters Direct line to customers and product decisions, not buried under layers of process