Senior Full-Stack Developer (Full-Time) — Take Ownership of Software Portfolio, Path to Lead

About the role I run a portfolio of software projects and I'm hiring a full-time senior developer to take them over — not to build from scratch, but to learn established, working systems and progressively own them. This is a long-term position with a clear growth path: once you're up to speed, we'll bring on a product manager and a couple of junior developers, and you'll step into the lead role for that team. What you'll do - Months 1–3: Onboard onto the portfolio project by project. Pair with me on handoffs, learn the architecture and deploy pipelines, and take over day-to-day development and maintenance of the first projects. - Months 3–6: Own the majority of the portfolio — feature work, bug fixes, releases, and production support — with decreasing involvement from me. - Beyond: Help me hire a PM and junior devs, then lead that team: code review, task breakdown, mentoring, and technical direction. Deliverables are concrete: shipped features and fixes through our PR process, passing CI, and documented handoffs. You'll always know what "done" looks like — work is tracked with defined acceptance criteria. Required skills - 5+ years professional software development, with real production ownership (you've been the person responsible when things break) - Strong Python and TypeScript - AWS (Lambda, [API Gateway / ECS / RDS — adjust to your services]), including infrastructure as code - Solid Git/GitHub workflow: branching, PRs, code review, CI/CD - Security-conscious development habits — we run security review as part of our process, not as an afterthought Nice to have: prior experience inheriting/maintaining existing codebases, mentoring juniors, or leading a small team. How we work - Everything runs through GitHub - Async-first communication with a regular sync - I value proactive communication over silent progress: flag blockers early, say what you don't know, and push back when you disagree with a technical decision. That's a feature, not a risk, in this role — you're being hired to eventually own these decisions. What to include in your proposal 1. A codebase you inherited (rather than wrote) and how you got productive in it 2. Your experience with our stack, with links to work where possible 3. Your time zone and available hours I read every proposal personally. Generic/AI-templated applications without the three items above will be declined.