Architectural Designs (AD) is one of the largest online marketplaces for house plans, serving millions of prospective homeowners, builders, architects, designers, and contractors annually. We’re the category leader and have been around for over 43 years.
Buying a house plan is one of the biggest decisions most people will ever make, and we get to be there for it. People finish building and send us photos of the house. We know most of our designers by first name. We've worked with some of the same builders for years, and a good number of our own team have been here more than a decade. It's a rare thing to work on software that matters this much to the people using it.
The opportunity
Everything we've built so far, we've built with an external development partner. What we've never had is an engineer of our own: someone who sits with our customers and our customer support team, forms a view about what the site should do, and goes and builds it.That's this job. Building, at a volume that would have taken a team not long ago. One engineer with a real AI practice can now own serious ground, and we'd like to find out how much.
What you’d be doing
The scope is the site: catalog, faceted search across 28,000 records, checkout, content pipeline, infrastructure, new consumer experiences.
1. Build.
Most of your week, most weeks. We want the work that matters most to us happening in-house, close to the people who talk to customers every day. The more you can carry, the more of it moves here.
2. Bring ideas, not just implementation.
There's a real backlog of high-priority work waiting, plus untapped revenue surface and a long list of things we've never gotten to. Learn how people actually shop for a house plan, where they stall, what our support team hears daily — then argue for what's worth building. Product decisions here get made together, across a few people with strong views. Nobody will hand you a spec, and nobody will stop you from having a better idea.
3. Build the harness.
A codebase legible to agents, tests and typed boundaries strong enough to serve as the contract, our own systems wired in so agents can do real work instead of suggesting it. Then running several in parallel without the output turning to slop, and solving the review bottleneck. Nobody has settled answers here, and we'd rather you go find them than wait for a consensus — on a live ecommerce site, where the brakes matter as much as the throttle.
The engineering
Search and ranking across 28,000 plans with dozens of filterable dimensions. Image-heavy pages where load time is the difference between ranking and not. Checkout that handles configurable plan sets and build licensing. A content pipeline our team uses to publish daily.
Who we are looking for
- A product engineer, not an implementer. You look at an ecommerce funnel and see three things worth testing, and you can build all three yourself.
- Genuinely AI-native, in practice rather than theory. You've restructured how you work around these tools and can say specifically what changed, including the experiments that didn't pan out.
- Fast in a system you didn't build. You've shipped confidently into a production codebase someone else wrote, with revenue running through it.
You’ll need to be strong in TypeScript and React/Next.js and comfortable working in production infrastructure without a platform team behind you. The rest you can pick up.
The stack
- Next.js, TypeScript, CSS
- Ruby (legacy, being migrated out)
- AWS, Cloudflare
- Contentful
- Stripe
- Sentry
- LiveChat, Mailchimp, Google Analytics, and assorted marketing platforms
What we want you to know
- You'd be the only engineer at Architectural Designs. You'd work alongside our partner's engineers, but nobody inside this company can check your work or tell you your approach is wrong.
- Your job is to ship. Not to manage, not to coordinate — to put working software in front of customers, week after week.
- Design stays with our partner for now. You won't design, but you will be expected to have taste.
- We're a profitable family business, not a startup. No venture money, no growth-at-all-costs mandate — just a company that already works and a lot of latitude.
Details
- Location: full-time or potential for hybrid with 2–3 days per week in Fairfield, CT
- Base salary: depends on experience
- Benefits: heath, vacation, generous time off, 401(k) match, additional bonuses, meals on site
- Reports to: CEO