Senior Product Engineer, React Native + Backend

About Base

Base is a platform for in-real-life social connection and community. Our Members are accomplished people who have built careers, families, and reputations. They come to Base for what their calendars are missing: regular, in-person time with peers they actually want to know. The gathering is the product.

The systems that make it possible are what this role exists to protect.

Engagement

Contract: 4 to 6 week paid audit, with the option to extend into implementation.

About the Role

We're looking for a senior, hands-on engineer to audit and stabilize a consumer mobile product and its internal admin tool, HomeBase. This is a 4-week paid trial: come in, understand the system fast, separate the real problems from the noise, and ship. It's a stabilization engagement, not a net-new feature role. The long-term build-and-own seat is a separate Tech Lead position.

The system spans a React Native + Expo mobile app, a TypeScript monorepo, two backend APIs on AWS (a member-facing API and an admin/back-office API) that run the Stripe payment, subscription, and refund integrations, a Supabase Postgres database with hundreds of migrations, an automation and data-integration layer (n8n-style workflows plus reverse-ETL into downstream tools), and Metabase reporting. Parts of it are mid-migration and lightly tested.

This is not a greenfield build. We need someone who can quickly understand an existing codebase, identify architectural and execution risks, separate real problems from noise, and ship fixes that hold.

What You'll Do

• Audit the React Native + Expo mobile app and the HomeBase admin flows.

• Review the backend and API structure, the Postgres data models, and the business logic around bookings, guests, cancellations, refunds, credits, and notifications.

• Trace the payment path (Stripe) and the automation / data-integration layer (n8n-style workflows and reverse-ETL) for fragility and silent-failure points.

• Identify technical debt, broken workflows, security gaps, stale code, and missing tests.

• Review Linear and project artifacts, and compare planned work against what actually shipped.

• Produce a prioritized technical recovery plan.

• Ship or supervise one small but meaningful stabilization fix during the trial.

• Recommend the exact team needed to continue: mobile, backend, data, QA, or design.

Must Have

• Senior or staff-level full-stack experience shipping production React Native + TypeScript apps.

• Strong backend experience building and operating GraphQL APIs on a relational database (Postgres or similar), deployed on a cloud provider. We run AWS + Supabase.

• Hands-on Stripe across subscriptions, refunds, invoices, webhooks, and reconciliation, integrated into backend services (ours run on AWS).

• You've worked inside messy, partially-migrated, lightly-tested systems and brought order without freezing delivery.

• You make fast, pragmatic judgment calls in unfamiliar code and explain them clearly to a non-technical founder.

• Comfort working without perfect specs.

Nice to Have

• Experience with Metabase or analytics cleanup

• Experience migrating away from NativeBase, NativeWind, or inconsistent styling systems

• Experience with mobile release pipelines, QA automation, push notifications, and email workflows

• Prior startup rescue, code audit, or fractional CTO experience

• Expo and EAS builds in production, with manual store submission (no OTA).

• Apollo Client and GraphQL on the front end.

• Supabase specifically (Auth, Postgres, Storage).

• Automation glue and reverse-ETL: n8n, Hightouch, Airflow, or similar.

• Stripe in a booking, marketplace, or membership context.

• Mobile observability and E2E testing: Sentry, PostHog, Maestro.

• Metabase or analytics cleanup.

• Migrating away from NativeBase, NativeWind, or inconsistent styling systems.

• Untangling a codebase mid-rewrite (legacy and new trees coexisting in production).

• Prior startup resc