Full Stack Engineer (Washington, D.C.)

Location: Washington, D.C. (HQ2)
Team: Engineering • Full‑time • Pre‑seed

Hoplynk is building the communications and networking layer for the intelligent edge, ensuring resilient connectivity for autonomous systems and mission-critical operations in any environment. We’re a pre-seed startup spun out of Stanford University and based in San Francisco developing an embedded software/firmware stack that delivers multipath, failure-aware networking across heterogeneous links so critical systems stay online when networks don’t.

You’ll work on engineering our operator console, bridging our firmware and routing software with a great user experience. Your mission: turn telemetry, network setup, and monitoring into intuitive, no code workflows. You’ll work on building a robust API to enable a seamless flow of telemetry, design intuitive dashboards and analytics platforms, and fine tune Hydra’s copilot. You’ll partner closely with networking, embedded systems, and backend engineers to ship a fast, reliable application.

• End to end design and deployment of HYDRA’s user interface: You’ll be responsible for building out HYDRA’s core control plane. This includes link management features (ability to add, remove, and manage networks), real-time dashboards for device/link health; anomaly detection and notifications, etc. You’ll design an easy to use, low code interface for network configuration and monitoring.

• Routing/Firmware backend interface: Deploy and maintain a comprehensive backend (REST/gRPC/WebSockets) to consistently pull realtime network health, setup, and data from the embedded device.

• HYDRA copilot: Experiment with and deploy AI enabled features for designing network configurations, answering basic system queries, and managing network health.

• Design system & accessibility: Ultimately, good design and ease of use are key to HYDRAs value proposition. With every feature you ship, you’ll ensure the system is truly plug and play and conducive to an end user’s needs. This may involve conversations with customers and key stakeholders.

• Testing and Deployment: contribute UI tests/e2e smoke tests; add observability (front-end metrics, logs, etc), and help in building a comprehensive networking test bed for the system..
  

• Experience building and maintaining production-scale web applications, ideally using modern frameworks like React or similar component-based ecosystems

• Strong fluency in JavaScript, TypeScript, CSS, and Node.js

• Hands-on experience designing real-time dashboards, observability or admin tools that surface live data - comfortable working with streaming APIs, WebSockets, or adaptive polling strategies for low-latency updates.

• Familiarity with caching layers (e.g., Redis, Varnish)

• Experience fine-tuning and deploying semantic search systems or chatbots, ideally having worked with vector databases (e.g., Pinecone, Milvus, pgvector) and embedding models.

• Rust fluency - familiarity with Axum, gRPC, and websockets/SSE

• Strong product sensibility for complex, technical UIs — able to translate ambiguous requirements into intuitive workflows, communicate trade-offs, and design low-code or configurable interfaces that serve both technical and non-technical users.
  

• Solid grasp of cloud-native infrastructure — containerization with Docker, CI/CD pipelines, and deployment to AWS.

• Familiarity with advanced data visualization for rendering complex telemetry or analytics data.

• Experience building or integrating real-time data pipelines, event-driven systems, or messaging (e.g., with Kafka Redis Streams).

• Prior work with observability stacks (OpenTelemetry), and with networking/embedded systems.
  

TypeScript · React · Next.js · Node.js · Tailwind · WebSockets/gRPC/REST · Rust · Postgres · OpenTelemetry · GitHub Actions · Vespa

• Candor: Say the hard thing kindly, early, and with evidence. Speak up during decisions.

• Humility: Strong opinions, loosely held. Change your mind with facts. Teach and learn in the open; celebrate team wins over heroics.

• Initiative: Run toward the smoke. Own problems end-to-end. Ship in small, safe steps with clear, observable outcomes.