Youth Inc | Head of Engineering | Chicago, Nashville or Boston
Youth Inc. is a venture-backed commerce and media company focused on the youth and high school sports market.
We are looking for a Head of Engineering. This is the most senior technical role in the company, reporting directly to the CEO. You will own the architecture, execution, and evolution of our proprietary commerce platform while building and leading a small, high-impact engineering team.
This is not a role where you manage engineers and stay out of the code. It is not a role where you write code and stay out of the business.
What We Are Looking For
1. Experience at a growth-stage company. This is the most important qualifier. You have built and scaled systems as a company grew around you.
2. Strong communication skills. Given our organizational structure, you report directly to the CEO, join partner calls, and work laterally with our GM of Commerce. A brilliant engineer who cannot communicate clearly with non-technical stakeholders will not succeed in this role.
3. Full-stack technical depth.
4. 8+ years of engineering experience with meaningful time leading teams.
5. E-commerce or marketplace experience is a strong plus.
6. Elixir or Phoenix experience is a plus, not a requirement. We will not eliminate a great candidate over language experience.
Location: Chicago, Nashville, or Boston preferred. Open to remote for the right candidate.
This is a role for someone who wants to build something that matters in a market that is ready for it. If this sounds like you, we would love to hear from you.
- Primary technical authority for the engineering team
- Own architectural decisions, tradeoffs, and long-term technical direction
- Lead design discussions and write clear design docs
- Guide the evolution of data models, APIs, and system boundaries
- Design, build, and maintain Elixir/Phoenix services in production
What We’re Looking For
- 7+ years of professional software engineering experience
- Strong backend experience with Elixir (or deep experience in another functional or concurrent language with willingness to go deep in Elixir)
- Outstanding communications skills
At Youth Inc., we’re on a mission to empower youth athletes and their families with trusted content and a best-in-class e-commerce experience. Our Elixir/Phoenix-powered platform reaches millions of users—coaches, trainers, and parents—while our B2B marketplace supplies premium team gear to hundreds of programs across the U.S.
What You’ll Do:
- Design, build, and maintain core Elixir/Phoenix microservices, APIs, and worker processes
- Lead database schema design, indexing strategies, and PostgreSQL performance tuning
- Define and implement infrastructure-as-code and CI/CD pipelines
- Establish best practices: code reviews, automated testing, observability (Datadog/Sentry)
What We’re Looking For:
- 4+ years professional software engineering experience, with at least 2 years in a senior or tech-lead capacity
- Deep knowledge of PostgreSQL (schema design, query optimization, replication)
- Strong Linux system administration and cloud operations (AWS/GCP) skills
- Expertise with Docker, Kubernetes (or ECS), and Git-based workflows
Youth Inc (https://youth.inc) | Front End Engineer, Elixir Engineer | Remote (US) | Full Time
Youth Inc. is a digital media network and commerce marketplace working to help youth athletes and their families thrive. We have an experienced founding team, have closed our seed round and are rapidly growing.
We're looking for:
- a full-stack Elixir Engineer to build and own a greenfield supply chain and fulfillment application. Bonus if you have great ops skills as well.
- a front-end engineer ( Next.js / Node / TypeScript ) to own the front-end web application. Bonus if you have great design skills as well.
These two people will form the core of the engineering team and will drive the systems and the culture.
Nothing you do on Serendeputy will affect anything on Twitter -- I'm not trying to play any viral games. That was a easy first principle to start with.
I'll keep working on the tool tips and the copy. I'm working on the balance of "simple for first time user" vs. "expose the depth of the application..."
You need a Twitter account to sign up. You don't need to have a super-active Twitter account for it to be useful -- the links coming through Twitter seed it for you, but you control everything else.
Everything is public, though, so if you don't want to sign up, all the tag pages are still available for you. If you really like Erlang (as we all do), you can hit https://serendeputy.com/erlang and see the current index. Each page has a RSS feed attached to it, so you get these in your favorite reader.
I've been using Elixir for 4+ years, and I'm very happy with it. I'm a one-man band, so the talent pool isn't an issue.
My biggest joy is that once you get the application working, it stays working. I have ~20 production nodes, and they all just happily run. This was not my experience with Ruby and Rails.
It's not fun to try to interpret Erlang crash dumps, though.
Youth Inc. is a venture-backed commerce and media company focused on the youth and high school sports market.
We are looking for a Head of Engineering. This is the most senior technical role in the company, reporting directly to the CEO. You will own the architecture, execution, and evolution of our proprietary commerce platform while building and leading a small, high-impact engineering team.
This is not a role where you manage engineers and stay out of the code. It is not a role where you write code and stay out of the business.
What We Are Looking For
1. Experience at a growth-stage company. This is the most important qualifier. You have built and scaled systems as a company grew around you.
2. Strong communication skills. Given our organizational structure, you report directly to the CEO, join partner calls, and work laterally with our GM of Commerce. A brilliant engineer who cannot communicate clearly with non-technical stakeholders will not succeed in this role.
3. Full-stack technical depth.
4. 8+ years of engineering experience with meaningful time leading teams.
5. E-commerce or marketplace experience is a strong plus.
6. Elixir or Phoenix experience is a plus, not a requirement. We will not eliminate a great candidate over language experience.
Location: Chicago, Nashville, or Boston preferred. Open to remote for the right candidate.
This is a role for someone who wants to build something that matters in a market that is ready for it. If this sounds like you, we would love to hear from you.
Please email [email protected]
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