Full Stack Engineer Job Description
A complete full stack engineer job description template, plus the ATS keywords hiring teams screen for and what the title promises versus a generalist role.
"Full Stack Engineer" means something different depending on company size, and the honest version of the title is closer to "we need one person to own a feature end to end" than "you will be equally expert at everything." At a five-person startup, that's true necessity. At a larger company still using the title, it more often means frontend and backend were never split into separate teams, and the posting hasn't caught up to what the role actually asks of one person day to day.
True, even depth across frontend and backend is rare past a certain level of seniority — most people who call themselves full stack lean one direction and are competent, not expert, in the other. That's not a weakness to hide in an interview; an honest answer to "which side are you stronger on" reads better to an experienced interviewer than an unconvincing claim of perfect parity.
This posting is also a useful case study in a smaller trend: a full-time, in-office requirement on a role that, at most companies, ships remote. That's not automatically a red flag, but it's worth asking about directly. An onsite-only policy on an engineering role, when the rest of the market has moved on, sometimes reflects a leadership preference that predates remote work becoming normal, and sometimes reflects a genuine need for in-person collaboration on a small team. Ask which one it is before you assume either.
Verrantine · Chicago, IL
Full-time · On-site
$110,000 – $150,000
About the role
Verrantine is hiring a Full Stack Engineer to join a small team building our internal operations tools — the software our own support and finance teams use daily, as distinct from the customer-facing product other engineering teams own. You'll work across a React frontend and a Node.js backend, usually owning a feature from its database schema through to the screen someone clicks on.
This is a four-person engineering team without a formal frontend/backend split, based in our Chicago office five days a week. We're looking for someone who wants that breadth — deciding the data model one day and debugging a layout issue the next — rather than someone hoping to specialize into one side of the stack.
What you'll do
- Build features end to end — database schema, API, and the React interface that uses it — for internal tools.
- Talk directly with the support and finance teams who use what you build, without a product manager as intermediary.
- Own small services in production, including diagnosing and fixing issues wherever in the stack they turn up.
- Write automated tests across both the API and the frontend components you build.
- Deploy your own changes and monitor them after release.
- Participate in sprint planning and estimate work honestly, including the parts that turn out to be harder than expected.
- Review teammates' pull requests across both frontend and backend code.
- Propose and prioritize technical debt fixes in tools you use daily yourself.
What we're looking for
- Three or more years building production features that span both a frontend and a backend.
- Working proficiency in JavaScript or TypeScript on both sides of the stack — React on the frontend, Node.js on the backend.
- Practical SQL: comfortable designing a schema and writing the queries that hit it.
- Experience owning a feature from a rough requirement through to a shipped, working product.
- Comfort working without a dedicated QA or DevOps function backing up your work.
- Ability to work from our Chicago office five days a week.
Nice to have
- Experience deploying and monitoring applications on AWS or a comparable cloud provider.
- Familiarity with GraphQL as an alternative to REST for internal API design.
- Some exposure to infrastructure or deployment pipelines, even informally.
- Experience working on internal tools specifically, where the user is a coworker rather than a customer.
- Comfort with ambiguity — internal-tools requirements are often a chat message, not a spec.
Benefits
- Medical, dental and vision coverage, with employee premiums covered in full.
- 401(k) with a 3% company match.
- Free daily lunch in the Chicago office.
- $1,500 annual learning budget, usable on conferences, courses or books.
- Fifteen days of paid time off plus company holidays, rising to twenty after two years.
Salary range
As posted for this sample role. Real pay varies by employer, location and experience.
$110,000–$150,000/ yr
ATS keywords for this role
The applicant tracking system (ATS) — the recruiting software a hiring team searches and filters applicants with — will screen for these. Weight shows how central each one is to this specific posting.
Required and central (4)
Important (6)
Mentioned in passing (9)
Frequently asked questions
Is full-stack the same thing as being a generalist?
Close, but not identical. "Generalist" can mean someone who moves across engineering, product and even design; "full stack" specifically means both ends of a web application. In practice most full-stack postings are describing a generalist engineer, and the title is really signaling that the role won't be scoped to only frontend or only backend work.
Do I need to be equally strong at frontend and backend?
No, and be suspicious of any posting or interviewer who insists otherwise. Most experienced full-stack engineers lean toward one side and are solidly competent, not expert, on the other. What actually matters is whether you can ship a complete feature without waiting on someone else to cover the half you're weaker at.
Does starting as a full stack engineer hurt if I want to specialize later?
Generally not — full-stack experience is a common and well-regarded path into a specialized senior or staff role, because you've already seen how a decision on one side of the stack creates work on the other. The harder transition is often the reverse: moving from years of narrow specialization back into a role that expects breadth again.
Why would a company require this role to be onsite when most similar roles are remote?
It varies, and it's worth asking rather than assuming. Sometimes it reflects a genuine belief that a small, tightly coupled team works better in person; sometimes it's a legacy policy nobody has revisited since the market shifted. Either answer is useful information before you accept an offer, and a company that can't articulate a reason is telling you something too.
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