What are the responsibilities and job description for the Junior Software Engineer, AI-Forward position at Texas Sports Academy?
Description
Texas Sports Academy is a K-12 school designed for serious student-athletes who want both elite academics and high-level athletic development. Students cover 2x the material in just 2 hours a day, using the same 2-Hour Learning model as Alpha Schools. That frees up their entire afternoon for serious training, where they work alongside former pro and D1 athletes coaching them at the highest standard.
We're hiring a Junior Full-Stack Product Engineer to build the web apps and internal tools that run our K-12 campuses. You'll own features end to end in a TypeScript stack: React and Tailwind on the frontend, Node and API routes on the backend, Postgres for data. The bar is the product itself, with real users, real features, and real polish.
This is early-career, but we want someone who already ships full products on their own. If you've built a TypeScript app end to end, designed a schema, written the API, shipped the UI, and put it in front of real users, you're the kind of engineer we want to talk to. We care more about what you've built than where you went to school.
What You'll Do
Texas Sports Academy is a K-12 school designed for serious student-athletes who want both elite academics and high-level athletic development. Students cover 2x the material in just 2 hours a day, using the same 2-Hour Learning model as Alpha Schools. That frees up their entire afternoon for serious training, where they work alongside former pro and D1 athletes coaching them at the highest standard.
We're hiring a Junior Full-Stack Product Engineer to build the web apps and internal tools that run our K-12 campuses. You'll own features end to end in a TypeScript stack: React and Tailwind on the frontend, Node and API routes on the backend, Postgres for data. The bar is the product itself, with real users, real features, and real polish.
This is early-career, but we want someone who already ships full products on their own. If you've built a TypeScript app end to end, designed a schema, written the API, shipped the UI, and put it in front of real users, you're the kind of engineer we want to talk to. We care more about what you've built than where you went to school.
What You'll Do
- Build Full-Stack Features in TypeScript: Own features end to end in a TypeScript stack (Next.js, React, Node), from the UI to the API routes to the database schema. Ship them to production and iterate based on how people actually use them.
- Design UI That Holds Up: Build clean, responsive interfaces in React and Tailwind that work the first time on a parent's phone and a coach's laptop. You care how it looks, not just whether it renders.
- Own the Backend Behind Your Features: Write the API routes, data models, and database queries that power what you build. Postgres, Prisma or Drizzle, and basic auth patterns are not someone else's job.
- Think in Products, Not Tickets: Take a rough problem from a coach, parent, or operator, scope it into something shippable, and decide what to build and what to cut. Push back when the spec is wrong.
- Model Data and Write the Queries: Design Postgres schemas, write the migrations, and tune the queries your features depend on. Use Prisma or Drizzle as the ORM, and drop down to raw SQL when it's the right call.
- Integrate the Tools We Run On: Build the integrations and webhooks that connect our app to Google Workspace, Notion, Slack, Workable, and our AI providers.
- Keep Production Healthy: Handle the parts that are not glamorous: logging, error states, loading states, monitoring, and the small details that keep a product from feeling cheap.
- You've Shipped Full-Stack TypeScript Apps: Not a tutorial clone. Something you built end to end in Next.js or a similar TypeScript framework, with a real database, real users, and a real URL. Be ready to walk us through how you built it and what you'd do differently.
- Strong Product Instincts: You can look at a half-formed idea and turn it into a working v1. You make calls about scope, edge cases, and what the user actually needs without waiting for a PM to spell it out.
- You Care About the Frontend: You write clean React, you have opinions about component structure and state management, and you notice when spacing, typography, or loading behavior is off.
- You Can Own the Backend Too: You can model data in Postgres, write the API, handle auth, and reason about performance. You don't bounce off the database layer.
- Comfortable Across the Stack: You can jump from a React component to an API route to a database migration in the same afternoon and not slow down. You don't have a side of the stack you avoid.
- You Finish What You Start: You communicate clearly, flag blockers early, and get features across the finish line. Speed matters, but completion and polish matter more.
- Location: Remote (U.S.). U.S. work authorization required.
- Design Sense: You're comfortable in Figma, can take a rough sketch to a working UI, and have a point of view on what good product design looks like.
- Public Work to Show: A GitHub profile, a live side project, a personal site, or a writeup of something you built. Anything that lets us see how you think and what you have done.
- Experience with Our Stack: Next.js, React, Tailwind, Postgres, Prisma or Drizzle, tRPC, Vercel. Not required, but a head start.
- SQL and Light Data Work: You're comfortable writing queries, cleaning up data, and building small internal dashboards when the situation calls for it.
- AI Image or Video Generation: You've used Nano Banana Pro, Veo, Seedance, Kling, or similar tools to produce real assets. Not required, but a real plus.