Senior Full Stack Developer (Ai-Powered Analytics Platform)

12-month contract to hire/1099

Location: Northwest Arkansas (On-site/Hybrid)

FIELDBOOK, a studio operated by Alloy Partners, is dedicated to creating and accelerating advantaged retail technology startups. We are seeking a Senior Full Stack Developer to help build and scale Umami.

Umami is an AI-enabled Food & Beverage innovation platform that analyzes customer reviews and consumer data to generate strategic product insights for CPG brands. We turn millions of customer reviews into actionable business intelligence — combining machine learning, consumer data, and a brand's unique advantages to take innovators from insight to innovation.

As the Senior Full Stack Developer, you will work closely with the Co-Founder/CEO and Head of Product as a core technical thought partner and the primary builder of the platform. You'll work across a sophisticated stack involving LLM APIs, complex data pipelines, automated data acquisition, and modern frontend frameworks.

Who You Are:

• You take ownership — you treat the product like it's yours and don't wait to be told what needs attention
• You're solution-oriented — you identify problems but show up with answers, not just concerns
• You're accountable — you do what you say you're going to do, within the time you committed to
• You know when to escalate and when to just solve it — you can distinguish between decisions that need leadership input and problems that have commonly acceptable solutions
• You're pragmatic — you value code quality but avoid over-engineering, and you ship things that work
• You thrive in small, high-trust teams where autonomy is high and process is lean
• You find the work genuinely enjoyable — we're supporting food innovation, not curing cancer. Let's have fun together.

What You'll Do:

• Build and optimize AI analysis pipelines (review → product → brand → persona aggregation)
• Develop source-specific data acquisition and content extraction logic
• Design and implement Vue/Inertia frontend features with complex data visualization
• Write and maintain comprehensive test coverage (Pest v4)
• Optimize database queries and job queue performance
• Integrate with OpenAI API for structured analysis
• Debug distributed queue systems and async processing issues
• Collaborate on API design and data schema evolution
• Participate in code reviews and architectural decisions

What You'll Work With:

• Backend: PHP 8.3 / Laravel 12
• Frontend: Vue 3 (Composition API) / Inertia.js v2 / TypeScript
• Styling: Tailwind CSS v4
• AI/LLM: OpenAI GPT-4 with structured outputs
• Database: MySQL 8.0
• Testing: Pest v4
• Real-time: Laravel Reverb (WebSockets)

Requirements

• 6+ years in PHP/Laravel — modern architecture, queue systems, complex Eloquent relationships
• 6+ years in JavaScript/TypeScript — component-based architecture, reactive state management
• Real production experience with LLM/AI APIs — structured outputs, prompt engineering, token management, rate limiting, and failure handling
• Experience building and debugging distributed queue and async job systems
• Strong testing discipline — TDD mindset, mocking external services, E2E experience
• Ability to communicate technical risk and trade-offs clearly to non-technical founders
• Comfort reading, improving, and owning unfamiliar codebases

Nice to Have:

• Vue 3 Composition API and/or Inertia.js experience
• Familiarity with MCP servers and agentic AI development workflows
• B2B SaaS or CPG/retail domain experience
• Data visualization (Chart.js, D3.js)

Benefits

• Competitive compensation. This will be a 1099 position until Umami is spun out and incorporated
• A collaborative, flexible, and entrepreneurial environment with a proven venture studio playbook
• A highly validated concept and business model hypothesis developed by our team 
• The support of the venture studio and platform services, our goal is to surround the startup with world-class expertise in every discipline required to build a market-leading company