Full Stack Software Engineer

About the Role

Protege is hiring a Software Engineer for our Presentation team, the squad that builds the surfaces where Protege's data catalog meets the people who use it. That means two products: the internal dashboard our team uses to catalog, curate, package datasets, and the customer portal where AI labs browse, stream, and evaluate content before they license it.

This is a product engineering role in a TypeScript and Next.js codebase. You'll talk directly with the people who use what you build, design the interfaces yourself, and ship the whole feature: UI, API, data model, and tests. The datasets behind these screens are large and multimodal (video, audio, motion capture, documents, medical imaging), so a lot of the craft is making that volume feel fast, legible, and good to use in a browser. This role is ideal for engineers who want to ship whole features, not tickets, and grow fast by building directly for the people who use their work.

What You’ll Do:

• Ship features across our internal dashboard and customer-facing portal, from design through tests and rollout
• Talk directly with the partnerships, solutions, and sales teams who use what you build; watch how they work, find the friction, and turn it into features
• Design the interfaces you build: layout, hierarchy, interaction, and the empty, loading, and error states, often starting from a rough idea rather than a finished mock
• Build the workflows our catalog and solutions teams use every day: sample creation, customer access management, and delivery exports
• Build the customer-facing experience for browsing, streaming, and evaluating multimodal samples
• Implement playback, preview, and file-handling UX for content that lives across buckets
• Build UI on top of embedding-based search so users can find the right clips within catalogs of millions
• Extend and consume the API routes behind these surfaces (Next.js route handlers, Postgres, AWS)
• Handle sensitive data correctly: scoped access, secure share links, and PHI-aware routes
• Contribute to our shared design system and component library, and write tests as part of shipping

What Success Looks Like:

30 days: Learn and Build Relationships

• Ship your first features to production in both apps
• Sit with the teams that use our tools while they work; come back with a list of the friction you saw
• Build a working map of the catalog domain: how content is ingested, curated, sampled, and delivered, and which teams touch each step

60 days: Develop and Cultivate

• Own well-scoped features end to end with light guidance, from a one-line ask to shipped, tested product
• Make design decisions on your own features that hold up: clear layouts, sensible states, interactions that feel right
• Become the go-to engineer for at least one surface area (e.g., delivery exports or customer access flows)

90 days: Make an Impact

• Deliver a meaningful feature independently, from talking to the people who need it through design, build, and rollout.
• Contribute at least one improvement to our shared UI components or testing patterns that other engineers pick up

What You Bring:

Must Haves

• 2+ years building production web applications that real users depend on
• Strong TypeScript and React, with experience in Next.js or a comparable full-stack framework
• You've shipped user-facing features end to end: UI, API, data model, and tests
• Design sense: you can take a feature from rough idea to a clean, usable interface, and you notice when spacing, hierarchy, or an interaction feels off
• Comfort working across the stack, including Postgres and cloud services (we use AWS)
• You notice when a flow is confusing or slow, and you fix it without being asked
• Comfort with ambiguity and evolving priorities; you'd rather ship and iterate than wait
• Curious and proactive

Nice to Haves

• Experience with media playback in the browser (HTML5 video/audio, HLS, containers and codecs)
• Experience building search or data-heavy interfaces over large datasets
• A portfolio, side projects, or shipped work that shows your eye for UI
• Familiarity with auth systems (we use Clerk) and permission modeling
• Experience working with sensitive or regulated data (HIPAA, PHI)
• Prior startup experience

Protege Values

Pass the Loved Ones’ Test: We act with integrity and do the right thing — especially when it’s hard and no one is watching.

Always Find a Way: We are resourceful, resilient builders who solve hard problems and push through obstacles.

Go Fast and Grow Fast: Velocity matters. We move with urgency, learn quickly, and continuously improve as individuals and as a company.

Practice Kindness and Candor: We communicate directly and respectfully, building trust through honest feedback and genuine care for one another.

Deliver Together: We win as one team. Collaboration, accountability, and shared ownership drive our success.

Own the Outcome. Hone the Craft.: We take pride in our work, sweat the details, and continuously raise the bar for excellence.