Staff Software Engineer, Color Cloud
Leads the architecture and development of in-store systems for Madison Reed’s Hair Color Bars, integrating AI tools into colorist workflows while ensuring reliability for mission-critical retail operations.
- Compensation
- $170K–$175K / yr
- Location
- HQ
- Work setup
- Not specified
- Seniority
- Staff
- Employment
- Contract
- Experience
- 8+ years
- Category
- Software engineering
- Posted
Skills
Must have
- 8+ years of professional software engineering experience, with deep expertise building production systems in JavaScript/TypeScript (Node.js, React).
- A proven track record of building, shipping, and maintaining complex, data-heavy applications in production at scale.
- Mission-critical systems experience. You’ve built software where downtime has immediate, visible business cost, and you design for reliability, graceful degradation, and recovery accordingly.
- Mastery of state and performance. You understand the render cycle, know how to keep interfaces responsive under load, and can orchestrate complex asynchronous data flows. Strong command of TypeScript
- Full lifecycle ownership. You build things that run reliably in production, not just pass review, owning the CI/CD pipeline, error rates, and your software’s behavior in the real world.
- Your workflow has been altered by AI. You are already using frontier agentic coding tools (e.g. Claude Code, Codex) to build faster, and can describe specific ways they have structurally changed how y
- Demonstrated technical leadership. A track record of setting technical direction, designing scalable and maintainable architecture, and measurably leveling up the engineers around you.
- A high-ownership mindset with a bias toward action, comfort operating in ambiguity, and strong product intuition.
- Experience building or operating the AI/LLM infrastructure that other engineering teams build on (agent frameworks, eval pipelines, retrieval/RAG, prompt and tool-call tooling).
- Exceptional communication and collaboration skills, with low ego and high standards.
Nice to have
- Experience building point-of-sale, payments, or retail/store-operations systems. Experience with offline-first architectures, device fleets, or hardware/peripheral integrations. Background in appointm
Full description
Staff Software Engineer, Color Cloud
The Staff Software Engineer on the Color Cloud team is a unique and vital role within Madison Reed, owning the technology that runs our Hair Color Bars. This role involves architecting and leading the development of the systems that power the in-store experience, driving the technical strategy for Hair Color Bar operations, and contributing to the organization’s long-term architectural vision. Working in a cross-functional, agile, ai-first environment, the engineer collaborates with teammates, product owners, designers, store operations, and stakeholders to ship reliable, fast, premium tools for the people serving our guests face-to-face. You mentor, inspire and lead engineers at all levels and foster a culture of innovation, collaboration, and excellence.
We expect our Staff Software Engineer to build AI-powered experiences into the colorist and store toolset, color formulation, consultation, and operational copilots, and to have fundamentally changed how they build by working alongside frontier agentic coding tools, while retaining the deep technical ownership required to audit, verify, and own everything that ships.
The base range for this contract position is between 170,000 and 175,000. At Madison Reed, we aim to pay competitively. Factors which may affect starting pay within this range may include geography/market, skills, education, experience, and other qualifications of the successful candidate. This role must be based in the United States.
What You'll Do
- Own the Color Cloud platform end-to-end. Architect, build, and ship the Color Cloud platform making foundational technical decisions that shape how stylists check guests in, build color formulas, run consultations, and transact.
- Drive technical strategy for in-store systems. Identify opportunities for innovation and lead the adoption of new technologies, tools, and patterns across the Color Cloud surface area.
- Build AI-powered experiences for colorists. Put AI directly into the hands of the people serving our guests, surfacing personalized formula and service recommendations, powering consultation and conversational tooling, and integrating LLM-backed features into the colorist workflow.
- Engineer for the realities of a physical store. Treat reliability, offline resilience, payments, and hardware integrations (card readers, receipt printers, tablets) as first-class concerns. When a Color Bar is open, these systems cannot be down, design for that bar.
- Champion UX and performance for working professionals. Obsess over the details that make a tool fast and trustworthy in the hands of a colorist mid-appointment: latency, responsiveness, error recovery, and the accessibility standards required to support a diverse workforce.