Lead Full-Stack Engineer

We're Sharp Performance

Sharp Performance is transforming mental wellness for those in high-demand professions, starting with public safety.

Our mission is to extend the service-life and health span of those who run toward danger: law enforcement, firefighters, and other frontline professionals. Through our mobile platform, we connect them with elite performance coaches trained in cognitive performance methods adapted from the U.S. Special Operations community.

This is not a lifestyle brand. This is not "tech for tech's sake." This is applied resilience, delivered where it matters most.

We're backed by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) and investors behind Uber, Airbnb, PayPal, and Palantir. Partnerships are forming weekly. The mission is expanding quickly.

We are early. We are building. And success is not guaranteed.

If that excites you more than it scares you, then let's go.

About the role

We're spinning up a new squad at Sharp Performance to build a 0-to-1 product, and we're looking for a Lead Full-Stack Engineer to be the technical anchor. You'll set the architectural direction, write a meaningful share of the code yourself, and guide the output of a small team (1–2 direct reports to start, growing as the product proves itself).

This is a player-coach role. You'll be hands-on in the codebase day-to-day, but you'll also be the person making sure what the squad ships is coherent, well-scoped, and actually moves the product forward. If you want to be heads-down on a single component, this isn't the role. If you want to shape a product from a blank page — technically and as a small team — read on.

What you'll do

• Lead technical design and architecture for a new product being built from scratch, making the early decisions that will shape it for years.
• Build full-stack: own features end-to-end across the frontend (Next.js or Vue) and backend, including API design, data modeling, and infrastructure choices.
• Mentor and manage 1–2 engineers — running meetings, giving feedback, unblocking them, and growing them as the team grows.
• Partner closely with product and design to translate fuzzy problems into shippable scope, and push back when scope and reality don't match.
• Set the bar for code quality, testing, and review practices in a new codebase where the patterns you establish will compound.
• Make pragmatic trade-offs between speed and durability — knowing when to ship the duct tape version and when to invest in the right abstraction.

What we're looking for

• 7+ years of full-stack engineering experience, with deep proficiency in JavaScript/TypeScript and a modern frontend framework (Next.js or Vue).
• Strong product engineering instincts. You think in terms of user outcomes, not just tickets, and you've shipped things customers actually used.
• Experience leading a small team's technical output — whether as a tech lead, staff engineer, or engineering manager. Comfortable giving feedback, running planning, and being accountable for what the team delivers.
• Track record of building something from 0 to 1 — joining early, working through ambiguity, making decisions without complete information.
• Solid backend chops: comfortable designing APIs, working with relational databases, and reasoning about performance and reliability.
• Strong written and verbal communication — you can explain a technical decision to a PM and a junior engineer in the same Slack thread.
• Nice to have
• • Experience with our adjacent stack (analytics tooling, observability, feature flagging).
  • Have managed engineers directly before, even informally.

Why this role

You'll be employee-zero on a new product inside an established startup — the upside of greenfield work with the support of an existing team, customer base, and infrastructure. You'll have unusual leverage over what gets built, how it gets built, and who builds it.