Software Developer

Wonderist Agency is a full-service marketing agency that supports 1,200+ dentists around the country. We pride ourselves on ditching the old fashioned marketing model of stock photos and templated sites. We strive to tell our clients’ stories with bespoke brands, impactful photo and video shoots, and stunning website design (Here is a great example of our work: www.valordentaltx.com)

We’re a team of over 90+ passionate marketers with our headquarters nestled in sunny San Diego. We are walking distance from local hangouts, bars, and the famed Liberty Station. While many companies simply check the required boxes when it comes to culture, a well-balanced team and positive office culture has been the core of our success from the start. We are a social team at heart, and that is one constant that hasn’t changed with all the movement this economy and industry has seen. We have embraced a hybrid work model where local team members come in at least two days a week. This allows us to work from home and have flexibility, without altogether forgoing the excitement and moments of collaboration and inspiration you can only get from in-person time. Not to mention, we also genuinely enjoy spending time together and socializing.

We celebrate new ideas and prioritize a culture of trust and respect where team members can grow and take risks. Each quarter we host events under our four cultural pillars; health & wellness, personal & professional development, social good, and social. We are proud to have been named: San Diego Business Journal’s Best Places to Work in: 2018, 2021, 2022 and 2023, Inc 5000 Regionals Fastest Growing Companies in: 2021, 2022, 2024, 2025, and 2026, San Diego Business Journal’s Fastest Growing Private Companies list in 2019, 2020, 2022, 2023, and 2024, Inc Best Workplaces list in: 2024 and 2025, and Inc. 5000 for the last 6 years (2019-2025)!

If you work at Wonderist, you likely enjoy a challenge, appreciate autonomy, actually care about clients, and are looking for a team that you can enjoy being part of.

Job Description

As a Software Developer at Wonderist, you'll help build and evolve the in-house platforms and automations that make our agency run — the systems our clients rely on for integrated marketing, the internal tools our team uses to deliver great work, and the AI-powered capabilities we're layering on top of both. You'll work end-to-end: shaping architecture, writing production code, integrating third-party services, designing data models, and shipping things that real teammates and real clients use the next day.

This is a small, high-trust engineering team, so the role is intentionally broad. You'll have significant ownership over what you build and how it evolves. We're looking for an engineer who can get productive in our current stack quickly, but who is also excited to help shape what the stack looks like a year or two from now.

Essential Functions: What You’ll Do

The mix will shift over time, but expect your work to span most or all of the following:

• Platform Engineering: Maintain and extend our multi-tenant web application — the system that powers integrations and CRM capabilities for our clients. Make thoughtful architecture decisions around tenancy, scaling, and performance as our footprint grows.
• Full-stack Application Development: Design, build, and ship production web applications. Own the full lifecycle — architecture through deployment — and contribute to our front-end component system.
• Data and Integrations: Design and maintain the databases, sync flows, webhooks, and background jobs that move information between our systems and the third-party platforms our clients depend on (telephony, messaging, CRM, marketing analytics, scheduling, and practice management tools, among others). Build integrations that are observable, idempotent, and resilient to partial failures.
• AI-powered Systems: Help integrate large language models, embeddings, and vector search into real business workflows — internal copilots, intelligent reporting, classification and prediction, and agentic automations. Build the data foundations that make the rest of the company's information actually usable by AI.
• Automation and Tooling: Replace fragile no-code automations with reliable, well-tested Python services where it matters. Build the internal tooling and dashboards that help client-facing teams move faster and serve clients better.
• Reliability and Quality: Establish and maintain the testing, monitoring, logging, and CI/CD practices that let us deploy with confidence. Document what you build so the rest of the team — and future-you — can pick it up.

Core Competencies: What you’ll bring to the role

• Engineering Fundamentals: Strong grasp of software design, clean code, testing, version control, code review, and shipping production systems. Comfortable navigating an existing codebase — not just starting greenfield projects.
• Python and a Modern Web Framework: Production experience building and shipping web applications in Python. Our current platform is Django, and ramping up on Django quickly is part of the job; equivalent experience in another mature web framework plus a real willingness to learn Django is acceptable.
• Relational Databases: Solid command of a production-grade relational database (we use PostgreSQL): schema design, indexing, query optimization, migrations, and debugging real performance issues. Awareness of scaling strategies — read replicas, partitioning, sharding — even if you haven't implemented all of them yourself.
• Asynchronous and Integration-heavy Systems: Experience designing systems driven by webhooks, background jobs, and third-party APIs. Comfortable with task queues, retries, idempotency, and the failure modes that come with distributed systems.
• Cloud Deployment and DevOps: Comfortable with Git workflows, containerization (Docker), CI/CD, and deploying to a managed cloud platform (Heroku, AWS, GCP, Azure, or similar).
• APIs: Working knowledge of designing and consuming REST APIs, plus the operational pieces around them (auth, rate limiting, error handling, observability).
• Practical AI/ML Experience: Hands-on experience integrating LLM APIs (OpenAI, Anthropic, or similar) into real applications, plus a working understanding of embeddings, retrieval-augmented generation, and prompt design. Depth here is welcome but not required on day one — interest and momentum matter more than résumé checkmarks.
• Product Mindset: You can sit with non-technical teammates, understand what they actually need, and translate that into systems that fit the business. You ship things that work for the people who use them.

Personality Musts:

Our perfect fit is someone who is a problem solver who understands the difference between "yes, and…" and "yes, but…" You should have a hungry, scrappy personality with a positive attitude and aim to deliver. Working in the client service industry can mean going the extra mile, and we need someone who is always willing to rise to the occasion for our clients and puts forward beautiful work that exceeds client expectations. Someone who is detailed and organized, driven, and displays vigor and comes ready to play every day. Confidence, self-discipline, and a congenial, curious mind are things we love and admire.

Minimum Qualifications:

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical field — or equivalent professional experience.
• Professional experience shipping production web applications in Python.
• Strong working proficiency with PostgreSQL or a comparable relational database.
• Experience with background jobs / async task processing (Celery, RQ, Django-Q, or similar).
• Experience deploying applications on a managed cloud platform.
• Solid understanding of Git and collaborative version control workflows.
• Working knowledge of REST APIs and webhooks.
• Hands-on experience integrating an LLM API into an application.
• Comfort analyzing business processes and translating them into technical solutions.

Bonus Points for Applicants With…

(if you don’t have these but are organized and want to learn, we want to hear from you!)

• Hands-on experience with Django and HTMX or other server-rendered hypermedia front-ends.
• Heroku at production scale — dynos, Postgres add-on, Scheduler, buildpacks, cost management.
• Multi-tenant SaaS experience: tenant isolation, per-tenant configuration, scoped data access.
• Direct integration experience with telephony/messaging providers (Twilio, SendGrid, Mailgun, etc.), marketing/CRM platforms (HighLevel, HubSpot, Salesforce, etc.), or healthcare/practice management systems (Nex Health, Dentrix, Open Dental, etc.).
• Vector databases and RAG in production (Pinecone, Weaviate, pgvector, or similar).
• Agentic AI systems — multi-step workflows, function calling, prompt orchestration and caching.
• Postgres scaling experience (Citus, application-layer sharding, read replicas, large dataset migrations).
• JavaScript and a modern front-end framework (React, Vue, etc.), or Chrome extension development.
• NLP work — call analysis, transcription (Deepgram, AssemblyAI, etc.), sentiment, classification.
• Testing discipline — pytest, CI-driven test suites, and quality validation patterns for AI systems.

Our Current Stack

• Here’s what you’d be working in - The role isn't limited to this list, and the stack will evolve:
• Backend: Python, Django, Django REST Framework
• Database: PostgreSQL (multi-tenant, with sharding considerations)
• Front end: HTMX, Alpine.js, server-rendered components
• Async: Celery / background workers
• Hosting: Heroku (dynos, Postgres, Scheduler)
• AI: OpenAI and Anthropic APIs, vector search, RAG pipelines
• Integrations include: Twilio, Mailgun, HighLevel, Nex Health, Monday.com, PandaDoc, Calendly, Make.com, and others
• Tooling: Docker, Git, Slack-based internal AI tools