Founding Full-Stack Engineer (Programmatic SEO + Lead Gen)

My Crash Report publishes public car-crash records so people involved in an accident can find their report, understand what happened, and get connected to a vetted attorney. The site is live at mycrashreport.org with 4.2 million crash records from 11 state and city sources, refreshed nightly, running on AWS. It makes money by delivering qualified injury leads to law firms in Texas, California and Virginia, with more states coming.

We are a small, profitable lead-generation company with a media buying team already running Google and Meta campaigns. The founder set the vision and built the first version of the platform with AI coding tools. You will be the first and only engineer. You take over the codebase, the data pipeline, the infrastructure and the design, and you own them end to end. No product manager, no committee: you talk directly to the founder and the media buyers, decide how to build it, and ship.

This is a builder's role in a business where every page you ship, every second of load time you shave, and every tracking bug you fix shows up in revenue within weeks. If you want to see the direct effect of your engineering on a real business, and you are tired of being one of forty developers moving tickets, this is for you.

What you will own

In priority order. The first four are where you spend most of your time.

1. The website. Next.js 15, React 19, TypeScript, Tailwind 4, Postgres via postgres.js, MapLibre maps. Millions of crash, location and attorney pages rendered from the database. You own performance, caching, uptime and every pixel.

2. SEO infrastructure. Sitemaps for millions of URLs, crawl budget and indexation, internal linking, schema.org structured data, Core Web Vitals, Search Console monitoring, and the page templates that decide whether we rank for "car accident [city] [date]" queries or not.

3. Lead capture and delivery. The lead form, validation, consent capture, signed webhooks into the CRM, delivery monitoring and retries. If a lead is lost or delayed, we lose money that night.

4. Paid media tracking and landing pages. Google Tag Manager, GA4, Google Ads enhanced and offline conversions, Meta Conversions API, call tracking, and the landing pages and A/B tests the media buying team asks for every week.

5. Design. We have no designer. You design the site, the landing pages and the lead flow yourself, and make them look and convert better than the competition.

6. Crash-data pipeline. Python 3.12, Postgres 16 with PostGIS, a CLI with adapters for 11 state and city data sources (Socrata, ArcGIS, state DOT downloads). You keep the nightly refresh healthy, fix sources when they change, and add new states.

7. Infrastructure. AWS ECS, RDS Postgres, CloudFront, Route 53, S3, GitHub Actions deploys. Backups, monitoring, cost control, and you are the on-call.

8. Compliance implementation. Our attorney writes the rules (state bar advertising disclosures, consent language, data-handling requirements). You implement them exactly and keep an audit trail.

Must-haves

Apply only if all of these are true. We check each one in the screening exercise and the interview.

• 5+ years shipping production web applications, at least 2 of them with React and TypeScript on a server-rendered framework (Next.js preferred).

• You have run a production Postgres database with tens of millions of rows: indexing, query plans, migrations, backups. Not just an ORM.

• You have personally owned technical SEO and site architecture for a database-driven site with 50,000+ indexed pages, can show Search Console data for it, and can explain with numbers what you changed in structure, crawl budget, indexation or speed and what happened to rankings and traffic.

• You have personally set up and debugged conversion tracking for a paid media team: Google Tag Manager, GA4 and at least one of Google Ads conversions or Meta pixel plus Conversions API. You know why server-side tracking exists.

• You can read and modify Python data-processing code and SQL without hand-holding.

• You have deployed and operated something on AWS (or GCP or Azure) in production, including when it broke at night.

• You have a design eye. You can take a page from ugly to clean and high-converting without a designer, and you can show us one you did.

• Fluent written and spoken English, available 9am to 5pm US Central time, Monday to Friday.

• You write things down: runbooks, decisions, and clear commit messages. You will be the only engineer, so your documentation is the company's memory.

Nice-to-haves

• Programmatic SEO at the scale of 500,000+ pages, or work on a directory, listings, real-estate or legal site.

• Lead generation, insurance, legal or other regulated-marketing experience; familiarity with TCPA consent and state bar advertising rules.

• PostGIS or other mapping and geospatial work.

• AWS ECS, RDS and CloudFront specifically, plus GitHub Actions with OIDC deploys.

• Experience with GoHighLevel or another CRM's webhook and API surface.

• Daily use of AI coding tools (Claude Code, Cursor, Copilot). The current codebase was built this way and you will keep using them to move faster.

• Playwright or similar end-to-end testing, and accessibility testing.

• Experience as the only or first engineer at a small company.

How you will work

With the founder. A 30-minute call every morning. He brings the vision and the business priorities; you bring the plan, the trade-offs and the shipped work. You will disagree with him sometimes, and he wants you to say so with reasons.

With the media buying team. They run Google Search and Meta campaigns and they live or die on tracking and landing pages. Expect a weekly planning session where you agree on the landing page tests and tracking changes for the week, a tracking QA pass before every new campaign goes live, and a feedback loop where lead quality in the CRM drives changes to the pages. They should never have to wonder whether a conversion fired. You build them dashboards so they stop asking.

With the attorney. He sends you compliance requirements in plain English. You implement them exactly, confirm back what changed, and keep a record.

With AI tools. You are expected to use them every day and to review everything they produce. The codebase and runbooks were written this way and are thorough; your job is to own them, not to rewrite them for comfort.

Alone. Most of your week is heads-down building. You decide the architecture, the tooling and the order of work inside the priorities the founder sets.

First 90 days

• Weeks 1 to 2. Get the site, loaders and deploy pipeline running on your machine from the runbooks. Take over on-call for the nightly refresh and lead delivery. Ship your first fix to production. Deliver a written audit of the site: SEO, conversion tracking, performance, design and security, ranked by revenue impact.

• Weeks 3 to 6. Fix the tracking gaps from your audit and confirm every Google and Meta conversion end to end with the media team. Ship the first landing page test program. Start the design refresh of the crash report page and lead form.

• Weeks 7 to 12. Finish the design refresh with measured conversion lift. Add two new states to the data pipeline. Set up monitoring, alerting and cost reports so the founder can see the health of the business without asking you. Write down everything you changed.

By day 90 the founder should be able to go a week without opening a terminal, and the media team should trust every number in their dashboards.

Hours, location and terms

• Hours: 40 hours a week, 9am to 5pm US Central, Monday to Friday, on camera for a daily call. US holidays off, plus 15 days paid time off a year.

• Location: Remote, anywhere in the world. The hours are the requirement, not the country. If 9am to 5pm US Central is a night shift where you live, we will ask how long you have already worked those hours and for whom.

• Terms: Full-time independent contractor, paid monthly in USD. Compensation is competitive for your region and depends on how much of the must-have list you have actually done. You will state your expected monthly rate in the questionnaire. Reviewed at 6 and 12 months against business results.

• Equipment: You bring your own machine and a reliable connection with a backup. We pay for the tools and accounts you need.

How to apply

Complete the questionnaire on our careers website in your own words. Include specific examples you can walk through live in the interview.