Senior Full Stack Engineer

About this task

ABOUT POPCORN

Popcorn is an AI studio changing how ads get made. Brands and creators start

with a product link and finish with a complete video ad — script, cast,

location, storyboard, voiceover and final render, generated end to end in

minutes.

We are built for the Middle East and Arabic-first, and we are scaling now.

Behind that simplicity is the hard part. A single ad is a chain of AI calls

running for minutes across multiple providers, producing large media files,

costing real money per render, and it has to survive every kind of failure

without losing a customer's work or their credits.

THE ROLE

We are hiring a Principal Full Stack Engineer to take technical ownership of

the platform.

This is the most senior engineering hire we will make this year. You will own

the architecture, the backend, the database, security and infrastructure —

and you will build new product surfaces on top of them. You will set the

technical direction, and you will still be writing the code.

We are in a scaling phase. The decisions you make in the first six months

will determine what we can build for the next three years.

WHAT YOU WILL OWN

The architecture. Go deep on the foundations early, then own the technical

 direction from there.

The backend. The generation pipeline that orchestrates long-running AI

 renders across multiple providers, and everything that keeps it reliable.

The database. Schema design, indexing strategy, query performance and

 migration discipline on PostgreSQL.

Security. Authentication, authorization, data protection, and the standards

 that keep customer work and payment data safe.

Infrastructure and delivery. Serverless environments, CI, releases, and the

 operational health of production.

New studios. Building the next creation surfaces end to end, from database

 to interface.

Quality across the product. Holding a consistently high bar on performance,

 reliability and craft in every studio we ship.

Scale. Keeping the platform fast, the architecture sound and the unit

 economics healthy as load grows.

WHAT WE ARE LOOKING FOR

8+ years building software, with deep backend experience on systems

 carrying real production traffic.

Deep PostgreSQL: schema design, indexing, query plans, transactions,

 isolation levels, and how all of it behaves under load.

Strong TypeScript and Node in production, plus genuine React and Next.js

 experience. This codebase is TypeScript end to end.

You have designed and operated asynchronous, long-running systems where

 work takes minutes and failure is normal. You know why exactly-once is a

 lie and what to do instead.

Solid security fundamentals — authentication, authorization, data handling,

 and the common ways applications get compromised.

You have owned production: deployments, CI, and being responsible when

 something breaks.

Experience with systems that handle money, and the instinct for what

 correctness there costs — idempotency, reconciliation, and designing for

 the retry that will definitely happen.

You have taken a system through a growth phase and seen what breaks at ten

 times the load.

You operate without a spec. Given a goal and a constraint, you come back

 with a design, the tradeoffs and a recommendation.

BONUS POINTS

AI or ML infrastructure: inference orchestration, provider fallback, cost

 control per request.

Media engineering — ffmpeg, transcoding, large-file handling, object

 storage and CDN delivery.

Payments and billing, especially usage-based or credit-based models.

Bilingual or RTL product experience.

OUR STACK

TypeScript end to end. React 19 and Next.js 15 App Router with Tailwind and

our own design system. Next.js route handlers on Node. PostgreSQL with Prisma

and hand-written SQL migrations. Vercel serverless. Blob storage with CDN

delivery, ffmpeg and sharp for media. Auth.js for authentication. Stripe for

payments. Multiple AI providers across video, image, speech, lip-sync and

language. Vitest.

You do not need to have used all of it. We care about the depth of your

judgment, not the length of your tool list.

WHAT WE OFFER

Competitive salary

Full technical ownership of a product in its scaling phase

Direct access to the founders

Medical insurance

Annual leave

HIRING PROCESS

Intro call, 30 minutes.

Systems conversation, 90 minutes — we go deep on something you designed

  and operated: the constraints, the tradeoffs, and what broke.

Architecture session — we take a real problem from our roadmap and design

  it together.

Final conversation with the founders.