Full-stack Engineer

Songscription is a music-learning AI lab. It raised a $5 million seed led by Reach Capital, with Emerge Capital, 10x Founders, Dent Capital, and an angel from Guns N' Roses. It came out of Stanford's StartX. The founding team includes the CEO, a Stanford MBA, and the CTO, and the research behind the company solved the audio-to-MIDI problem it is built on. Traction is the headline: more than 150,000 users across 150 countries, growing about 60% month over month, all organic, with no marketing spend.

Songscription turns audio into sheet music. Upload any audio or a YouTube link and get accurate sheet music, MIDI, MusicXML, Guitar Pro tabs, or an interactive piano roll in minutes, across nine instruments. A second product, Anything Piano, is an iOS app that lets someone upload a song and learn it on a piano roll with real-time feedback. Under the hood is proprietary transcription AI for a problem that stumped music-information-retrieval research for decades. The team is small and fast. Seed stage, about 1 to 10 people, founded in 2024, in San Francisco.

Songscription is hiring a full-stack engineer for the AI product, to add support as the web app scales. They want a strong backend-leaning engineer who cares about music and does not need to carry the product-taste work alone.

The cultural filter is a real passion for music. Ideally you play an instrument and can read into music theory. The strongest signal is a music project you already built, a hackathon or a personal project, because it came from genuine interest. Not every project has to be about music. A consumer background is useful and not required. A prior music company is not required. The shape they know is a strong engineer who has been doing backend work elsewhere and wants the work to line up with that interest.

The first 30 days are mostly maintenance: bug fixing and product improvements on a fast-growing web app. A few months in, you start contributing to the product itself, alongside the existing product engineer. Ownership is shared and leans more toward product over time, while the maintenance load stays covered. They want someone experienced enough to think the engineering through, and who does not hand all of that thinking to an AI.

You own backend and infrastructure support on the web product, which has hundreds of thousands of monthly active users and is growing about 30% month over month. You own bug fixing and product improvements in the first month, then a growing share of the product. You keep a high-traffic product stable while it grows.

Bar: about 2 to 4 years. A strong full-stack engineer with a backend lean, and about 2 to 3 or more years in industry. New graduates only if the internships or projects are unusually strong, which is a less likely fit. You can start on maintenance in a live product right away. A music project built for fun, playing an instrument, and backend-oriented prior work are green flags. No genuine interest in music, a front-end-only background, needing to own the product vision, or handing all of the thinking to AI is a miss.

In office in the San Francisco Bay Area. Visa sponsorship is available. Medical, dental, vision, and life insurance, PTO, an in-office gym, and meals and snacks in the office. Posted work intensity is 9-9-5. The process is an intro with the CTO, a technical round that may start as a take-home, an on-site, then an offer.