Senior Software Engineer, Full Stack

The job

LIVE Employer public job feed (private-sector employer) Source: the employer's public careers feed · Data: listed 2026-10-27

Job description

Magic (makers of Loyalist) · New York, NY · In-office 5 days/week · $150k-$200k + equity

Hi! I’m Niky, a founding engineer. Before joining Magic, I was working at a clinical data AI startup while reading every hospitality book I could find. The half-formed product in my head turned out to already exist: Magic, which Maggie was building. Exhilarated, I jumped at the opportunity. A year down the line, we’re yet again looking for a foundational piece of our team (…you?)

What we’re building

Loyalist is the operating system that powers how our favorite restaurants remember you.

We ingest live data from ~30 third-party systems during service (reservations, POS, reviews, private events, marketing, e-commerce). We turn that data into guest profiles and automated actions: a server hands a VIP a comped glass of wine because the system flagged that she’s been posting five-star reviews over the last year. A marketing manager sends a happy-birthday offer to 2,000 guests at once, each message referencing the specific dish that guest ordered last time. A sommelier gets a heads-up that a two-top walking in tonight are repeat 2018 Barolo drinkers. We’re also actively moving beyond restaurants into the full span of hospitality: hotels, casinos, spas, and more, so that Loyalist becomes a full‑fledged system for hospitality service everywhere.

1,000+ restaurants run on Loyalist today, from neighborhood favorites to Carbone, Momofuku, Le Bernardin, and Daniel Boulud’s group. Some of the biggest have 5-10 million guests each and hundreds of millions of visits and orders going back 15 years, and we process more than 10 million guest interactions every year.

What the role looks like

You’d be a fullstack engineer shipping end-to-end features for restaurants. Engineers own the full arc here: talking to the customer, scoping the work, and shipping it.

An example feature I shipped recently is Journeys, our system for designing multi-step guest experiences across multiple venues and integrations. Operators define what should happen across a guest’s lifecycle (welcome, post-visit, lapsed-regular, anniversary), and Loyalist orchestrates it across reservations, POS, marketing, and reviews.

The biggest strategic direction right now is moving onboarding from engineer-led to operator-led. We’ve historically configured each customer’s Loyalist instance by hand (which is how I learned the industry). We want operators to drive most of that themselves. That’s a lot of UI work with real consequences, and much of it is what you’d be working on.

Who’ll thrive here

You’ll probably do well if:

• You like the gap between customer problem and development to be small. This involves an intimate understanding of the customer side of the company.

• You’ve shipped production code for long enough to have opinions about it. Experience matters more than name, and we prioritize building 0→1.

• You’re solid across some of our stack. TypeScript and Python, React, Django, SQL, and solid database design intuition as to when to use what.

You probably won’t thrive here if you want direction to come from above. Here it comes from you and the customer, and the failures of last Saturday's dinner service. Also if you’re not curious about restaurants, hospitality, or the physical-world data layer.

About the team

We’re 20 people, roughly half from restaurant and hospitality backgrounds and half from tech.

• Maggie is our founder. She cold-staged in Atelier Crenn’s kitchen in high school, did dining room ops at Eleven Madison Park, strategy at Momofuku, co-founded a restaurant media company at Wharton, and wrote her honors thesis on grit in Michelin-star restaurants.

• Chris has been owning our infrastructure end-to-end (Kubernetes, ETL, background job orchestration) and has a rare ability to make the trade-off call quickly. He also plays jazz and classical bass, sometimes in the office before a gig.

• Will leads our zero-to-one work in hotels and members clubs. He’s the person thinking hardest about what the data model looks like when a “guest” means something different than it does in a restaurant. He also goes to DJ sets and DJs for fun.

• Abby is on accounts and wrote the only academic paper in existence on food pop-ups

• Dylan, our founding partnerships lead, flew himself to Chicago on a Saturday to stage at Alinea. He spent the day folding napkins and serving arctic char off a bourbon stave.

• Julie, our head of growth, has a tradition of visiting Monet’s water lilies at the MoMA every year on her birthday. A restaurant partner noticed, and earlier this year mailed her three Monet prints with a handwritten note.

A few things about how we work:

• Every team member does a stage at a customer restaurant: it’s an industry practice where you shadow or work behind the scenes during a service. I did mine at Rezdôra. Dylan did his at Alinea. It’s framed as a requirement, but it’s really a perk, and it’ll change how you build.

• Lunch is from a different NYC restaurant every day. New hires pick the first week’s rotation.

• We’re in-office five days a week in SoHo. Everyone goes to dinner together more than is probably normal.

• We use AI aggressively. Claude for most of the coding, AI code reviewers, AI for investigation and planning. Nothing is off-limits.

I know joining a 20-person company in a niche industry is a real bet. I thought about it hard before I joined. What sold me was the specific combination of a team I’d learn from, problems that stretch me technically, and an industry I was already obsessed with.

A year in the bet has paid off in ways I didn’t expect. I’ve shipped more production code here than I did in three years at my last job. I’ve designed and owned systems end-to-end instead of contributing to someone else’s design. I talk to chefs and operators I used to read about, and they use features I built for them. If any of that sounds like the bet you want to make, I’d love to meet.

The offer

• Salary $150k-$200k + equity

• Comprehensive health, dental, and vision insurance for you and your dependents (HSA plans available)

• Flexible PTO

• Daily NYC lunch (see above)

• Access to coveted reservations in NYC

- Niky

Explore around this job

Field: Technology Sub-niche: Software engineering All jobs at Magic Jobs in New York Jobs in New York City, NY New York state guide

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About the role

This is a — role in the Technology field (Software engineering) at Magic.

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The city

New York City, NY is not one of the cities with its own page in our guides, so here is the state: New York.

The state economy in brief

New York is in the Northeast region (Middle Atlantic division) and has 19,852,366 residents (the 4th largest of the 50 states and DC by population), with a median age of 39.8. Its economy produced about $2,561,197 million in the latest four quarters (BEA), 3rd among states and DC, equal to $129,012 per resident.

Jobs and the labour market

The unemployment rate was 4.3% in 2026M09, which is 36th lowest of 51 (1st is the lowest). Employers had job openings equal to 4.1% of employment, 18th highest of 51, a measure of how hard it is to hire. The median wage across all occupations is $59,670 a year ($28.69 an hour), 17% above the national median ($59,670 against $50,980).

What people do and what it pays

The occupations with the most jobs in New York are Home Health and Personal Care Aides (663,140 jobs, median $39,620); Retail Salespersons (238,540 jobs, median $37,720); General and Operations Managers (206,740 jobs, median $130,860); Registered Nurses (205,810 jobs, median $109,440); Janitors and Cleaners, Except Maids and Housekeeping Cleaners (195,250 jobs, median $41,640). Among occupations with at least 2,000 jobs, the best paid are Cardiologists (median $492,040); Anesthesiologists (median $445,660); Radiologists (median $441,580). Compared with the nation, the state is most specialised in healthcare support (1.8 times the national share of workers) and legal (1.7 times the national share of workers).

Cost of living, taxes and workplace rules

Prices are above the national average in New York: the regional price parity is 107.9 against 100 for the whole country (47th lowest of 51). Median gross rent is $1,621 a month and the median household income $85,974, so a year of rent equals 22.6% of income; the median home value is $423,800. The state minimum wage is $16.00 (17.00 in NYC, Nassau, Suffolk, Westchester) (the higher of state and federal rates applies to most workers). State income tax on wages: Graduated, top rate 10.90%. It is not a right-to-work state, so union contracts can require fees from covered workers. It runs a state paid family and medical leave programme.

People and commuting

22.8% of residents were born abroad and 40.2% of adults hold a bachelor's degree or higher. Among workers, 48.8% drive alone, 21.6% use public transit and 14.9% work from home; 27.4% commute 45 minutes or more.

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Cybersecurity (762) Data, analytics and AI (3719) Cloud, IT and infrastructure (1147) Product management (927)

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The employer

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FAQ

What is the Senior Software Engineer, Full Stack job at Magic?

A private-sector role in technology (software engineering) listed 13 days ago. The full description is on this page and on the employer's page.

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New York City, NY.

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It was posted on 2026-10-27 (13 days ago). Jobs older than 90 days are not shown.

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Sources and terms

• Job data: Magic careers page public feed (listing dated 2026-10-27). The job disappears from this site when it disappears from the source.
• Wages and projections: BLS OEWS (May 2025) and Employment Projections 2025–35.
• City and county figures: Census Bureau ACS 2020–2024, BEA, BLS QCEW and LAUS, NASA POWER climatology; distances from Census Gazetteer coordinates.

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Sources

• BLS OEWS (wages and employment by occupation, May 2025)
• BLS Employment Projections 2025–35
• BLS Local Area Unemployment Statistics
• BLS JOLTS
• BLS State and Metro Area Employment
• Census Bureau American Community Survey (via Census Reporter)
• BEA GDP by state and Regional Price Parities
• IRS 2026 tax adjustments
• U.S. Department of Labor, minimum wage by state
• Tax Foundation state income tax rates 2026
• USAJOBS
• USCIS
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• NASA POWER climatology
• GeoNames / Census Gazetteer (coordinates)