Savas Labs

The Senior Full Stack Engineer leads the end-to-end development lifecycle across client engagements, partnering with designers, strategists, and project managers to architect, build, deploy, and maintain high-quality digital products. This role combines technical expertise with strategic thinking to deliver scalable, maintainable solutions that advance client goals.

As a senior member of the team, this individual independently leads technical client relationships, facilitates discovery and technical workshops, and drives engineering best practices across projects. They also help evaluate and advance the agency's AI-enabled development capabilities to improve delivery, strengthen client solutions, and increase team effectiveness.

Savas is a technology-agnostic agency with an AI-first mindset, and success in this role requires curiosity, adaptability, and the ability to work confidently across multiple platforms and frameworks. Successful Senior Full Stack Engineers embrace AI as a core part of how they solve problems, deliver technically excellent work, build trusted client relationships, and continuously improve how Savas designs, builds, and delivers digital products.

Responsibilities

Client Delivery

• Lead engineering efforts across multiple client engagements from discovery through launch and long-term maintenance.
• Architect scalable, maintainable, and secure technical solutions aligned with client goals and business requirements.
• Build custom web applications, websites, APIs, integrations, and CMS implementations using appropriate technologies.
• Collaborate closely with designers, strategists, project managers, and QA throughout the project lifecycle.
• Produce, maintain, debug, optimize, and extend applications and user interfaces.
• Establish and maintain local development environments using version managers, containerization, and modern development tooling.
• Configure and execute deployment workflows across development, staging, and production environments.
• Ensure work meets agency standards for accessibility, performance, security, maintainability, and documentation.
• Identify technical risks, dependencies, and opportunities early, communicating tradeoffs and recommendations throughout delivery.
• Participate in ongoing support, troubleshooting, and maintenance of launched client projects.
• Comfortable balancing technical excellence with client budgets, timelines, and evolving priorities.

Technical Leadership

• Serve as the primary engineering voice during client meetings, discovery sessions, technical workshops, and solution presentations.
• Lead technical planning and solution architecture for new initiatives and enhancements.
• Establish and reinforce engineering best practices, coding standards, and development workflows.
• Review pull requests and provide constructive feedback that improves code quality and team capability.
• Identify, prioritize, and help address technical debt while balancing delivery timelines and long-term maintainability.
• Evaluate emerging technologies, frameworks, and development practices to improve agency capabilities.

Agency Growth & Business Development

• Support business development through estimates, proposals, prototypes and technical discovery.
• Evaluate and implement AI-assisted development workflows.
• Contribute to internal tooling, documentation, knowledge sharing, and process improvements.
• Participate in internal initiatives, experimental projects, and retreats.

Competencies & Skills

• Technical judgment and adaptable problem-solving. Quickly gets up to speed on unfamiliar or inherited systems and makes sound implementation decisions across frontend, backend, and DevOps. Adapts as tools and technologies evolve, using AI to accelerate development while validating outputs and maintaining engineering quality.
• Ownership, autonomy, and reliability. Can be trusted to move a task or project forward responsibly, often across several clients at once. Takes initiative, estimates realistically, follows through, and flags risks to delivery, scope, or budget early. Knows what to handle alone and when to loop in teammates, PMs, or clients.
• Discovery, communication, and collaboration. Digs past the surface request to understand the underlying business problem before building. Collaborates closely with engineering and design, and translates complex concepts for technical and non-technical audiences. Comfortable clarifying ambiguity and discussing tradeoffs with teams and clients.
• Craft, quality, and security ownership. Cares that the work truly functions — beyond the happy path, through edge cases — as the final quality check before client review. Holds the line on fundamentals: accessibility, performance, version control, documentation, testing, and the security and data privacy that sensitive government, university, and nonprofit clients demand. Doesn't stop at 'works on my machine,' and leaves work documented and maintainable.
• Critical thinking and pragmatic product sense. Looks past task completion to downstream effects and tradeoffs, weighing the best path against timeline, budget, and long-term support. Knows when to push for a better solution, when to simplify, and when to get stakeholder input.

Professional Knowledge

• A breadth of full-stack experience in PHP CMS (Drupal, WordPress, Symfony and Craft) and/or JS stacks (React/NextJS, ReactNative)
• Developing themes and using templating languages
• Developing APIs and integrating with external APIs
• Deployments, establishing development workflows, and setting up local development environments on Docker
• Experience deploying applications across modern cloud hosting and Platform-as-a-Service environments (e.g. Pantheon, Vercel, Upsun).
• Creating CI/CD pipelines
• Communicating directly with clients and can effectively address non-technical audiences

Experience

• 5–8+ years of development experience, with meaningful time in an agency or consultancy environment
• Demonstrated experience leading technical discussions with both technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Hands-on experience using AI development tools responsibly to accelerate the delivery of production-ready software.
• Experience collaborating with designers using Figma or similar design tool
• Performing well in a fast-paced, multi-project environment where priorities shift
• Experience making architectural decisions and balancing technical quality against project constraints.

Education & Training

Education and training commensurate with a Senior Full Stack Engineer with 5–8+ years of experience, preferably in an agency environment.