Software Engineer — Full Stack
better-auth · San Francisco, USA ·
- Category
- Fullstack
- Experience
- 5+ years
About Better Auth
Better Auth is the most comprehensive authentication framework for TypeScript. We're the most upvoted YC Launch in history and are used by thousands of developers shipping everything from startup projects to enterprise products.
We’re a small team building foundational infrastructure that other developers depend on, so the bar is high: every decision we make affects security, correctness, and developer experience at scale. We’re also building an enterprise layer on top of the open-source framework for teams that need more operational, organizational, and compliance-oriented capabilities.
The Role
You’ll own the full-stack development of the Better Auth Infrastructure dashboard, the control plane our customers use to manage their auth deployments. Support teams use it to resolve user issues, operations teams use it to monitor activity, and developers use it to configure, extend, and trust their setup.
From App Router UI to API routes to the data and analytics layers underneath, you’ll build, ship, and evolve the product end to end. You have strong product judgment, strong design taste, and the ability to turn complex infrastructure workflows into clear, polished software.
You’ll help shape architecture, define patterns, and make tradeoffs across product experience, frontend implementation, backend systems, and data flows. You’ll work closely with the core auth and backend teams on new capabilities, but the product experience and implementation quality are yours to drive. This isn’t a role where you’re handed tickets — you’ll help define what we build next and why.
Why You Should Join
The product is already live, real, and growing. You won’t be maintaining a narrow slice of UI or polishing someone else’s roadmap. You’ll shape a real control plane across users, organizations, audit logs, security, billing, email, plugins, and more, with meaningful ownership from day one.
We’re a small team, so leverage matters. Strong ideas move quickly here. Your technical judgment, product instincts, and design sensibility will directly shape what we build and how we build it. This is a high-ownership role for someone who wants to move fast, think deeply, and help define what great infrastructure software feels like.
What You'll Work On
- Feature development — designing and shipping end-to-end capabilities across the platform, from API contracts and data models to polished UI for users, organizations, events, security, email, billing, branding, and plugins
- Product architecture — defining patterns for how the dashboard is built across frontend, backend, data fetching, permissions, analytics, and operational workflows so the system stays coherent as it grows
- Product UX — turning complex auth and infrastructure concepts into interfaces that feel clear, trustworthy, and fast; improving navigation, hierarchy, states, and interaction quality across data-dense workflows
- Analytics and observability — building dashboards for usage, activity, audit logs, security events, and operational insight, backed by real event and reporting pipelines
- Performance and reliability — improving rendering, caching, query behavior, and system responsiveness across the web app and the services behind it
- Security and enterprise readiness — implementing secure defaults, access controls, auditability, abuse prevention, and operational workflows that enterprise customers expect
What We're Looking For
- Experience level — 5+ years full-stack engineering experience with React and TypeScript; you’re comfortable with Next.js App Router and know how to reason about server vs. client rendering boundaries
- Ownership — you can take an ambiguous product area, define the right direction, and drive it to a high-quality result
- Product instinct — you think about what the user is trying to accomplish, not just what you were asked to build
- Design sensibility — you can create clean, functional, high-signal UI without a designer handing you every pixel
- Full-stack comfort — you’re comfortable moving across the stack, from API routes and database queries to production debugging and performance work
- Attention to detail — loading states, empty states, error handling, permissions, responsiveness, and polish matter to you
- Shipping instinct — you move quickly, make sound decisions with incomplete information, and know how to balance craft, scope, and momentum
Bonus Points
- Experience with design tools like Figma — you can go from rough idea to polished mockup before writing a line of code
- Experience with developer tooling or infrastructure products — you understand the audience you're designing for
- Prior work at a small startup where you owned a product surface end-to-end
Compensation & Benefits
- Competitive salary + meaningful equity with room to grow
- Health, dental, vision
- Unlimited PTO (that we actually encourage you to use)
- SF office access + daily catered lunches & snacks
Better Auth is an equal opportunity employer. We believe diverse teams build better security infrastructure.