Senior Software Engineer, Full Stack

Magic (makers of Loyalist) · New York, NY · In-office 5 days/week · $150k-$200k + equity

Hi! I’m Niky, a founding engineer. Before joining Magic, I was working at a clinical data AI startup while reading every hospitality book I could find. The half-formed product in my head turned out to already exist: Magic, which Maggie was building. Exhilarated, I jumped at the opportunity. A year down the line, we’re yet again looking for a foundational piece of our team (…you?)

Loyalist is the operating system that powers how our favorite restaurants remember you.

We ingest live data from ~30 third-party systems during service (reservations, POS, reviews, private events, marketing, e-commerce). We turn that data into guest profiles and automated actions: a server hands a VIP a comped glass of wine because the system flagged that she’s been posting five-star reviews over the last year. A marketing manager sends a happy-birthday offer to 2,000 guests at once, each message referencing the specific dish that guest ordered last time. A sommelier gets a heads-up that a two-top walking in tonight are repeat 2018 Barolo drinkers. We’re also actively moving beyond restaurants into the full span of hospitality: hotels, casinos, spas, and more, so that Loyalist becomes a full‑fledged system for hospitality service everywhere.

1,000+ restaurants run on Loyalist today, from neighborhood favorites to Carbone, Momofuku, Le Bernardin, and Daniel Boulud’s group. Some of the biggest have 5-10 million guests each and hundreds of millions of visits and orders going back 15 years, and we process more than 10 million guest interactions every year.

You’d be a fullstack engineer shipping end-to-end features for restaurants. Engineers own the full arc here: talking to the customer, scoping the work, and shipping it.

An example feature I shipped recently is Journeys, our system for designing multi-step guest experiences across multiple venues and integrations. Operators define what should happen across a guest’s lifecycle (welcome, post-visit, lapsed-regular, anniversary), and Loyalist orchestrates it across reservations, POS, marketing, and reviews.

The biggest strategic direction right now is moving onboarding from engineer-led to operator-led. We’ve historically configured each customer’s Loyalist instance by hand (which is how I learned the industry). We want operators to drive most of that themselves. That’s a lot of UI work with real consequences, and much of it is what you’d be working on.

You’ll probably do well if:

• You like the gap between customer problem and development to be small. This involves an intimate understanding of the customer side of the company.

• You’ve shipped production code for long enough to have opinions about it. Experience matters more than name, and we prioritize building 0→1.

• You’re solid across some of our stack. TypeScript and Python, React, Django, SQL, and solid database design intuition as to when to use what.

You probably won’t thrive here if you want direction to come from above. Here it comes from you and the customer, and the failures of last Saturday's dinner service. Also if you’re not curious about restaurants, hospitality, or the physical-world data layer.

We’re 20 people, roughly half from restaurant and hospitality backgrounds and half from tech.

• Maggie is our founder. She cold-staged in Atelier Crenn’s kitchen in high school, did dining room ops at Eleven Madison Park, strategy at Momofuku, co-founded a restaurant media company at Wharton, and wrote her honors thesis on grit in Michelin-star restaurants.

• Chris has been owning our infrastructure end-to-end (Kubernetes, ETL, background job orchestration) and has a rare ability to make the trade-off call quickly. He also plays jazz and classical bass, sometimes in the office before a gig.

• Will leads our zero-to-one work in hotels and members clubs. He’s the person thinking hardest about what the data model looks like when a “guest” means something different than it does in a restaurant. He also goes to DJ sets and DJs for fun.

• Abby is on accounts and wrote the only academic paper in existence on food pop-ups

• Dylan, our founding partnerships lead, flew himself to Chicago on a Saturday to stage at Alinea. He spent the day folding napkins and serving arctic char off a bourbon stave.

• Julie, our head of growth, has a tradition of visiting Monet’s water lilies at the MoMA every year on her birthday. A restaurant partner noticed, and earlier this year mailed her three Monet prints with a handwritten note.

A few things about how we work:

• Every team member does a stage at a customer restaurant: it’s an industry practice where you shadow or work behind the scenes during a service. I did mine at Rezdôra. Dylan did his at Alinea. It’s framed as a requirement, but it’s really a perk, and it’ll change how you build.

• Lunch is from a different NYC restaurant every day. New hires pick the first week’s rotation.

• We’re in-office five days a week in SoHo. Everyone goes to dinner together more than is probably normal.

• We use AI aggressively. Claude for most of the coding, AI code reviewers, AI for investigation and planning. Nothing is off-limits.

I know joining a 20-person company in a niche industry is a real bet. I thought about it hard before I joined. What sold me was the specific combination of a team I’d learn from, problems that stretch me technically, and an industry I was already obsessed with.

A year in the bet has paid off in ways I didn’t expect. I’ve shipped more production code here than I did in three years at my last job. I’ve designed and owned systems end-to-end instead of contributing to someone else’s design. I talk to chefs and operators I used to read about, and they use features I built for them. If any of that sounds like the bet you want to make, I’d love to meet.

• Salary $150k-$200k + equity

• Comprehensive health, dental, and vision insurance for you and your dependents (HSA plans available)

• Flexible PTO

• Daily NYC lunch (see above)

• Access to coveted reservations in NYC

- Niky