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Staff Software Engineer, Color Cloud The Staff Software Engineer on the Color Cloud team is a unique and vital role within Madison Reed, owning the technology that runs our Hair Color Bars. This role involves architecting and leading the development of the systems that power the in-store experience, driving the technical strategy for Hair Color Bar operations, and contributing to the organization’s long-term architectural vision. Working in a cross-functional, agile, ai-first environment, the engineer collaborates with teammates, product owners, designers, store operations, and stakeholders to ship reliable, fast, premium tools for the people serving our guests face-to-face. You mentor, inspire and lead  engineers at all levels and foster a culture of innovation, collaboration, and excellence. We expect our Staff Software Engineer to build AI-powered experiences into the colorist and store toolset, color formulation, consultation, and operational copilots, and to have fundamentally changed how they build by working alongside frontier agentic coding tools, while retaining the deep technical ownership required to audit, verify, and own everything that ships. The base range for this contract position is between 170,000 and 175,000. At Madison Reed, we aim to pay competitively. Factors which may affect starting pay within this range may include geography/market, skills, education, experience, and other qualifications of the successful candidate. This role must be based in the United States. What You'll Do Own the Color Cloud platform end-to-end. Architect, build, and ship the Color Cloud platform making foundational technical decisions that shape how stylists check guests in, build color formulas, run consultations, and transact. Drive technical strategy for in-store systems. Identify opportunities for innovation and lead the adoption of new technologies, tools, and patterns across the Color Cloud surface area. Build AI-powered experiences for colorists. Put AI directly into the hands of the people serving our guests, surfacing personalized formula and service recommendations, powering consultation and conversational tooling, and integrating LLM-backed features into the colorist workflow. Engineer for the realities of a physical store. Treat reliability, offline resilience, payments, and hardware integrations (card readers, receipt printers, tablets) as first-class concerns. When a Color Bar is open, these systems cannot be down, design for that bar. Champion UX and performance for working professionals. Obsess over the details that make a tool  fast and trustworthy in the hands of a colorist mid-appointment: latency, responsiveness, error recovery, and the accessibility standards required to support a diverse workforce. Own reliability in the wild. Treat CI/CD, monitoring, analytics, and release management as a fundamental part of the job, not an afterthought. Set a high bar through observability, error tracking, and optimization across a fleet of in-store devices. Take ownership of large, ambiguous initiatives and break them into actionable workstreams. Lead efforts to refactor and optimize large areas of the codebase, ensuring alignment with business goals and long-term scalability. Mentor and raise the bar. Establish patterns for code reuse, elevate the engineers around you through rigorous code review and testing practices, and foster a culture of technical excellence and knowledge sharing. Collaborate with product, operations, and leadership to align technical solutions with business priorities, shaping both what gets built and how it gets built. What We're Looking For 8+ years of professional software engineering experience, with deep expertise building production systems in JavaScript/TypeScript (Node.js, React) . A proven track record of building, shipping, and maintaining complex, data-heavy applications in production at scale. Mission-