Full-Stack "Readiness" Software Engineer

Soraban is a Series A startup automating the most painful parts of tax season for CPA firms. Our platform handles client data collection, document delivery, and tax workflow automation for firms across the country — and we're growing fast. We're a small, fast-moving engineering team where everyone ships, everyone owns what they build, and there's no committee between a good idea and production.

Readiness Role

Most engineering teams ask every engineer to be two people at once: the fast-moving explorer who figures out what to build, and the systems thinker who makes it scale, perform, and survive contact with real users. We've split those into two roles.

Discovery Engineers figure out what to ship — they prototype fast, validate with users, and prove out product ideas. Readiness Engineers — this role — take those validated prototypes and make them real: the right architecture, the right data models, performant, scalable, and secure. Depending on the project, that means taking a clean handoff and rebuilding from the ground up, pairing with a Discovery Engineer through the transition, or working embedded alongside them from early on.

If you're the engineer who's mildly offended by a missing index, an N+1 query, or an unvalidated input — the one who finds genuine satisfaction in taking something that works and making it something that lasts — this role was designed for you. This isn't cleanup work. It's the craft half of product engineering, given the focus and respect it rarely gets.

What you'll do

• Productionize validated prototypes. Take working v1s and design artifacts from Discovery Engineers and build the production version: architecture, data models, and implementation that will hold up under growth
• Own performance and scale. Our traffic is intensely seasonal — tax season is our Super Bowl, and it lasts four months. Systems you build need to hold up when every firm hits crunch at once
• Make security a property, not a patch. We handle sensitive taxpayer data for CPA firms, and security is a first-class engineering requirement here — you'll build it in from the data model up
• Set the technical bar. Your architectural decisions, data modeling, and code become the foundation other engineers build on. The patterns you establish compound
• Polish the front-end until it feels finished. Prototypes prove the idea; you'll refine the React/Next implementation until the details hold up — responsive edge cases, loading and error states, accessibility, and the small interactions that separate "works" from "feels professional"

What we're looking for

• 5+ years of professional software engineering experience
• Strong systems judgment — data modeling, query performance, background processing, caching, and the architecture instincts that come from having scaled real products (our stack is Ruby on Rails with React/Next)
• Security-minded engineering habits — you think about authorization, input validation, and data exposure by default, not as an afterthought
• The temperament for this role: you genuinely enjoy hardening, refining, and finishing — depth over novelty
• Strong collaboration instincts — this role lives at a handoff boundary, and making that boundary work takes clear communication, not just clean code
• A fast ramp. You'll join a mature codebase with real users, and we expect (and support) senior engineers contributing meaningful work within their first few weeks — not after a quarter of onboarding

Nice to have

• B2B SaaS or fintech background — especially products handling sensitive data
• Experience with compliance-adjacent engineering (SOC 2 environments, audit-friendly design, PII handling)
• Experience with seasonal or spiky-traffic systems
• History of successfully rebuilding or replatforming systems that started as prototypes

How we work

Our values aren't wall art. They describe how decisions actually get made here:

• Mission focused: The mission is our north star. We stay focused on what moves it forward and tune out the noise.
• Default to action: Move quickly and iterate. Progress over perfection. Learn by shipping.
• Solve with data: Instinct gets us asking the right questions — data gets us to the right answer.
• Automate first: Automate the repetitive work so we can focus where we add the most value. (This role is this value.)

Why this role

• A role designed around a real specialty. Most companies treat production engineering as what happens after the interesting work. We made it the job — with the autonomy and scope to do it right
• Ownership from day one. Small team, no layers. The systems you build ship to real firms, and you'll see the impact directly
• Series A momentum. We've found product-market fit with CPA firms and are scaling. Joining now means growing with the company, not maintaining someone else's decisions
• In-person team in Chandler. We work together in the office — fast feedback loops, real whiteboards, no meeting-scheduling purgatory

Logistics

• Full-time, in-office in Chandler, AZ
• Health, dental, and vision coverage
• 401(k)
• Paid time off