Mill is a waste prevention technology company reimagining what it means to eliminate waste, starting with food. We build smart systems and infrastructure for homes, businesses, and municipalities that transform food scraps from landfill-bound waste into valuable resources, including chicken feed. Tens of thousands of Mill’s residential food recyclers are already helping households divert millions of pounds of food scraps every year, paving the way for our upcoming launch of Mill Commercial—the industry’s first end-to-end solution for managing, understanding, and preventing food waste in commercial environments (e.g. grocery, restaurants, food services). At Mill, we are passionate about building easy-to-use, beautifully designed technologies that keep food in the food system and out of landfills.
We are seeking a highly skilled Senior Full Stack Tech Lead to join our engineering team. This is an individual contributor technical leadership role reporting to the Director of Software Engineering. You will drive the technical direction of your project area, write high-quality code across the stack, and act as the primary technical partner to product management, while mentoring engineers around you.
We've moved away from a frontend/backend split at Mill: every engineer here works full stack, typically leaning toward one side based on strength and interest, and teams are organized around projects rather than layers of the stack. You'll likely anchor on a given project for a sustained stretch — enough to build real depth and avoid constant context-switching — with real opportunities to rotate onto new projects and parts of the codebase over time.
AI-assisted development is core to how we build software, not a peripheral tool. We expect fluency with tools like Claude Code as part of your daily workflow, and as a senior level engineer, a role in raising the bar for how the team uses them.
Key ResponsibilitiesTechnical Leadership
- Lead the technical design and execution of full-stack web applications, ensuring alignment with business objectives and technical standards
- Architect and implement scalable, secure, and efficient full-stack solutions
- Evaluate and select technologies, frameworks, and tools — including AI-assisted development tooling — to improve team productivity and code quality
- Own estimates and technical delivery plans for your project area, and surface risks early
Development and Implementation
- Craft elegant, documented, and sustainable code spanning our full web stack, remaining ready to provide support for our native mobile environment when required
- Develop and optimize APIs, databases, and user interfaces
- Use AI-assisted development tools fluently as a standard part of how you write, review, and ship code
Team Collaboration & Product Partnership
- Mentor engineers, fostering a culture of continuous learning and improvement
- Conduct code reviews and provide constructive feedback to maintain high coding standards
- Act as the primary technical partner to product managers on your project — informing scope, sequencing, and tradeoffs — even though roadmap ownership sits with the PM
Quality Assurance
- Champion best practices in testing, CI/CD, and deployment
- Troubleshoot and resolve technical issues, ensuring minimal downtime and disruption
- Monitor and optimize application performance
- 6+ years of professional experience in software development with a focus on full-stack development
- Deep experience with modern frontend frameworks (e.g. React, Vue, Angular, or SvelteKit) — we use SvelteKit at Mill but recognize that strong React/Vue/Angular experience is highly transferable, especially with AI-assisted tooling, so prior SvelteKit experience is preferred but not required
- Strong backend experience with TypeScript/Node.js; comfort with serverless architectures (e.g. AWS Lambda) is a plus
- Solid understanding of SQL and NoSQL database systems
- Experience with cloud platforms (we run AWS) and modern deployment workflows
- Fluency with AI-assisted development workflows (e.g. Claude Code, Copilot) as a genuine part of your day-to-day practice — not occasional or exploratory use
- Strong software architecture fundamentals (e.g. microservices, serverless)
- Excellent problem-solving and debugging skills
- Experience with our specific stack: SvelteKit (web, deployed on Vercel), React Native (mobile), AWS Lambda with CDK (TypeScript) and Middy
- Familiarity with DevOps practices and infrastructure as code (e.g. Terraform, CDK)
- Strong understanding of security best practices in web development
- Prior experience working at a hardware company, particularly collaborating with firmware teams — we build physical devices, not just software, and comfort working alongside hardware/firmware engineers is a plus
- Prior experience in a people-management role, or clear interest and readiness to grow into one over time. This role does not manage people today, but we're looking for someone open to taking on direct reports as the team scales
- Strong communication and interpersonal skills — especially the ability to partner closely with product without owning the roadmap
- Comfortable holding technical ownership of a project over a sustained period, while staying energized by the opportunity to rotate onto new problems periodically
- Proactive, self-driven, and eager to take ownership of projects
- Passion for mentoring and developing engineering talent
The estimated base salary range for this position is $185k to $225k, which does not include the value of benefits or a potential equity grant. A wide range of factors are considered in making compensation decisions, including but not limited to skill sets, market conditions, experience and training, licensure and certifications, and business and organizational needs.
Skills Required
- 6+ years of professional software development experience focused on full-stack development
- Deep experience with modern frontend frameworks (React, Vue, Angular, or SvelteKit)
- Strong backend experience with TypeScript and Node.js
- Solid understanding of SQL and NoSQL database systems
- Experience with cloud platforms (AWS) and modern deployment workflows
- Fluency with AI-assisted development workflows (e.g., Claude Code, Copilot) as part of daily practice
- Strong software architecture fundamentals (microservices, serverless)
- Excellent problem-solving and debugging skills
- Prior SvelteKit experience (preferred but not required)
- Comfort with serverless architectures (e.g., AWS Lambda) and familiarity with AWS Lambda tooling (Middy)
- Experience with React Native and native mobile support (preferred)
- Experience with AWS CDK (TypeScript) and infrastructure-as-code tools (e.g., Terraform, CDK)
- Familiarity with DevOps practices, CI/CD, and security best practices
- Prior experience working with hardware/firmware teams or interest in doing so
- Prior people-management experience or clear interest/readiness to grow into management
Mill Compensation & Benefits Highlights
The following summarizes recurring compensation and benefits themes identified from responses generated by popular LLMs to common candidate questions about Mill and has not been reviewed or approved by Mill.
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Fair & Transparent Compensation — Pay is positioned as competitive for several senior technical and business roles, supported by multiple six‑figure base ranges in recent postings. Total compensation snapshots commonly cluster in the mid‑ to high‑$100Ks for individual‑contributor roles, reinforcing a generally market-competitive posture for the Bay Area.
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Leave & Time Off Breadth — Time-off coverage appears broad, including paid holidays, paid sick days, flexible time off, and an unlimited vacation policy, with some company-wide time off. The overall setup signals strong flexibility for managing personal time, though day-to-day use may depend on team norms.
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Healthcare Strength — Core health coverage is described as comprehensive, including medical, dental, and vision, alongside wellness programs and an FSA. The package breadth suggests a solid baseline consistent with tech-startup standards.
Mill Insights
What We Do
We’re on a mission to eliminate waste for good, starting with the food that ends up in landfills. Did you know that more than half of the food in landfills comes from home kitchens (ReFED)? And food in landfills turns into methane – which is 80x more potent than CO2 over a 20-year period (IPCC). At Mill, we’re working to turn kitchen scraps into food for chickens. This keeps food in our food system and out of landfills.
Why Work With Us
Food isn't trash. Mill keeps it from stinking up your kitchen – and the planet.
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