Senior Software Engineer — Next.js & Real-Time Deal Intelligence

About Thrifle

Thrifle.com is the most intelligent shopping platform in the United States. We're building the country's largest free database of retailer return policies (150+ retailers graded A+ to D), real-time CPSC and FDA product recall cross-checking, military and student discount verification, live Bureau of Labor Statistics Consumer Price Index data, EIA gas prices, and Federal Reserve borrowing rates — all surfaced inside the shopping flow so consumers can answer "Is this actually a good deal for me?" before they buy.

We are not a coupon aggregator. We are not a price comparison engine. We are an AI-first shopping intelligence platform with proprietary data, a custom multi-phase AI content pipeline (Anthropic Claude Sonnet 4.6 + Haiku 4.5), and live data integrations across federal economic datasets — building the most comprehensive consumer shopping intelligence layer on the internet.

We're a lean, founder-led team shipping fast.

The Role

We're hiring a senior full-stack engineer to own the Thrifle.com web platform end-to-end — from the Next.js front-end (pages router, MUI v5, Redux, Tiptap) through to the Node/Express/Mongoose backend and the Cloudflare edge layer. You'll work alongside the founder on a fast-shipping, high-volume site.

What You'll Build

• Real-time deal intelligence surfaces — return-policy grades, recall warnings, price history, military/student discount verification — rendered server-side for SEO and AI crawlers

• The /intelligence platform — live charts powered by FRED, BLS, EIA, CPSC, FDA data with Recharts + dynamic imports + Cloudflare edge caching

• Schema.org structured data, FAQ schema, llms.txt — the "Answer Engine Optimization" surface that gets us cited by ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini

• The Content Calendar admin tool — FullCalendar.js, drag-drop scheduling, AI idea research, multi-channel auto-publishing (Telegram, Pinterest, blog go-live)

• Soft paywalls, signup nudges, A/B-tested onboarding — the conversion layer

Tech Stack

• Next.js 14 (pages router), Material UI v5, Redux, Axios, Formik, Tiptap, Recharts, styled-jsx

• Node.js + Express 4 + Mongoose 5 (MongoDB), JWT auth via x-auth-token

• Anthropic Claude SDK, AWS S3 + Multer, Cloudflare edge cache + bot rules

• PM2 deploys on EC2, IndexNow for instant search-engine notification

What We Want

• 5+ years shipping production Next.js + Node.js applications

• Strong instincts for performance: SSR vs SSG, edge caching, bundle size, lighthouse scores

• SEO-aware: you've shipped sites that ranked, you understand canonicals, structured data, schema.org

• Comfort with MongoDB query optimization, indexes, aggregation pipelines

• Bonus: experience with LLM SEO / answer-engine optimization / structured-data-first content systems

Apply

Email [email protected] with: a link to a Next.js site you've shipped (anything from a side project to production), the technical decision you're most proud of, and the bug you spent longest debugging.