Senior Software Engineer

About Dockwa

Dockwa is the operating system for the marine economy.

More than 1,250 marinas run their business on our software and more than 500,000 boaters use our app to find and book slips, fuel, service, and more. Nearly half a million reservations moved through us in the last twelve months. We own the boater marketplace, marina operations, and the payments layer underneath both.

That distribution is the whole argument. When anyone can generate software, the durable advantage is being the system an industry already runs on. We have that in boating and we just raised to go take it global.

About the Role

You will build the software marina operators use to run their businesses, and the boater app on the other side of it.

Engineering is six people today and will be fourteen inside a year. That is a small team against a large surface: reservations, payments and money movement, dock and slip management, rent roll, boater CRM, service and work orders, accounting integrations, a native iOS app, and multi-currency as we move internationally. The gap between team size and surface area is the job. It means you make real decisions early, and your judgment matters more than your tenure.

You will own problems rather than tickets. Scoping, design, implementation, deploy, and what happens after. You will also spend real time in code you did not write, in a twelve-year-old system carrying live payment traffic, which is its own kind of skill.

Most of our customers run seasonal businesses where a bad Saturday morning costs them a weekend of revenue. You will know within days whether what you shipped helped them.

Who Thrives Here

The people who thrive at Dockwa have usually founded something, or joined something early and grew with it. They think in outcomes rather than tickets. They have opinions about the product and the business, not only the code. They would rather ship something an operator notices on a Saturday morning than win an argument about abstractions.

You should want to steer. There is more consequential work here than there are people to do it, which means you will help decide what gets built, not just build what was decided. We also treat AI as core development infrastructure rather than a side experiment, and we expect you to already work that way.

What You Need

• Production web applications you shipped and then owned, not just contributed to.
• Real AI fluency with receipts. Not tool familiarity. Work you could not have delivered without it.
• Comfort across a full stack. Ours is Rails, React, Postgres and AWS, but we will take judgment over stack match every time.
• The ability to read and improve unfamiliar code without proposing a rewrite.
• Writing clear enough to explain a technical tradeoff to a PM, a support teammate, or a marina operator.

Nice-to-Haves

• Payments and money movement experience: Stripe or Stripe Connect, ACH, settlement, reconciliation, multi-currency.
• Vertical SaaS or B2B software where your users operate a physical business rather than sit at a desk.
• International product work: currency, localization, tax, compliance.
• AWS beyond EC2 and S3: queuing, caching, and background jobs at scale.
• Experience on a team small enough that you were the one on call for what you built.

How We Hire

Short, collaborative, and built around real problems rather than memory tests or puzzles. We are screening for motivation and judgment over trivia, and we want you to finish the process more excited than you started it.

How We Work

We are a small team that is winning. Problems grow exponentially with each person added, not linearly, so we keep the organization lean on purpose and put people at the source of problems with real ownership.

We automate before we hire. We ship quality at speed and treat those as compatible. We own the full loop from discovery to payment to analytics, because controlling the data is what makes the intelligence products possible.

We move fast, and context does not always land perfectly. It is always fine to ask why.

We have an institutional partner in PSG and an annual plan that’s in our control. We’re investing heavily in product and engineering because the operating system of the marine economy is ours to build and own. Acquisitions are part of how we grow, and we have dedicated budget behind that as well.

Equal Opportunity

We hire for range on purpose. Different vantage points produce better arguments, and on a team this small every viewpoint in the room changes the outcome. Dockwa is an equal opportunity employer and considers all qualified applicants without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, age, disability, veteran status, or any other legally protected characteristic.