Full Stack Developer

Full Stack Developer — Spare Hand Students
Spare Hand Students is a fast-growing marketplace platform connecting college students with homeowners and businesses who need help with lawn care, cleaning, errands, moving, and more. We operate across multiple cities in Texas and are scaling rapidly. We are looking for a talented full stack developer to join our small, high-output team and help us build the systems and features that will take the platform to the next level.
This is a hands-on role. You will be working directly with our founders and development team on meaningful features that affect real students earning tuition money and real customers who depend on the platform every day. If you like seeing your work matter and moving fast without bureaucracy, this is the right environment.

What you will be building
You will be working across the full stack on a live, production marketplace application with a real and growing user base. Current and upcoming projects include:

A reliability and strike system that automatically manages student accountability — no-shows, cancellations, and suspension logic
A dynamic commission rate engine that adjusts platform fees based on student performance and customer ratings
Recurring job scheduling — allowing customers to lock in a student on a biweekly or monthly schedule
A student self-marketing system with public profile pages, shareable referral links, QR codes, and a dual-sided referral reward engine
Real-time push notification infrastructure — job alerts, reminders, confirmation gates, and escalation logic
In-app messaging improvements, before and after photo visibility, and review management tools
Admin panel features and tooling to give the operations team full visibility and control without developer dependency
SendGrid email automation sequences for customer re-engagement, recurring job promotion, and post-job follow-up
Authentication improvements including Apple Passkey and Samsung Passkey support
Fraud prevention systems including phone number verification, device fingerprinting, and referral abuse detection


What we need from you — technical requirements
Backend — C# / .NET (required)

Strong, production-proven experience with C# and ---------- ecosystem
REST API design and development — clean, well-documented, versioned endpoints
Experience with relational databases — schema design, migrations, query optimisation
Background job processing and scheduled tasks — cron jobs, queues, automated triggers
Push notification infrastructure — APNs (Apple) and FCM (Android) integration
Payment processing integration — Stripe or equivalent
SendGrid or equivalent transactional email API integration
Experience writing automated consequence systems — triggers, thresholds, event-driven logic
Strong understanding of authentication and security — OAuth, JWT, passkey support, fraud prevention

Frontend — React.js (required)

Strong React.js experience building production mobile or web applications
React Native experience is a significant plus given our mobile-first platform
Component architecture, state management, and performance optimisation
Deep link and universal link implementation (iOS and Android)
Push notification handling on the client side
Ability to build clean, intuitive UI that works equally well for tech-savvy college students and older, less tech-savvy homeowners
Experience with dynamic form flows, multi-step checkout, and real-time UI updates

General

Experience working on marketplace or two-sided platform products — understanding the supply side and demand side dynamic
Comfortable working on a live production system with real users — careful, tested deployments
Able to read an existing codebase and get productive quickly without needing everything explained
Strong communication — able to take a product requirement and turn it into a technical spec without hand-holding
Self-directed — this is a small team and you will need to own your work end to end


What would make you stand out

You have built a marketplace, gig platform, or two-sided app before and understand the unique challenges of matching supply and demand in real time
You have experience building reliability systems — strike policies, suspension logic, automated consequence engines — for a gig or labour platform
You have worked with commission or dynamic fee structures where platform fees adjust based on performance or behaviour
You understand referral programme mechanics, attribution tracking, and deferred deep linking ( ---------- or Firebase Dynamic Links)
You have built admin panels from scratch and understand what an operations team actually needs to manage a live product day-to-day
You are comfortable with SendGrid's Marketing API and Customer Journey automation builder
You have shipped React Native apps to both the App Store and Google Play
You genuinely care about what the product does — connecting students with their community and helping them earn money for school — and that comes through in how you think about the work


What working here looks like
This is a direct, founder-involved role. You will have clear priorities, real context on why things are being built, and the autonomy to make good technical decisions without getting approvals for everything. The product is live, the users are real, and the work you ship will be visible immediately. We move fast, we communicate directly, and we expect the same in return.
If you have built something from the ground up, know what it feels like when your code is the product, and want to work on a platform that is genuinely doing something good for college students — we want to talk to you.

To apply
Share your resume, a link to something you have built (GitHub, live app, or portfolio), and a short note on the most complex backend system you have built and what made it hard. Applications without a work sample will not be reviewed.