The posting
Who we are: At Focused, we move quickly to deliver quality software that achieves client outcomes and meets their customer's needs. We strategically partner with our clients to leverage our expertise in design and software, while our clients bring their own domain expertise. We work with a variety of clients from different industries, collaborating as we get new products to market, modernizing legacy systems, or helping teams learn the skills they need to be successful.
Our values:
- Listen first • We are experts in product practices but life long learners in the domain of our customers. We research, collaborate, and understand.
- Learn why • We ask questions and talk to users to understand problem spaces, objectives, and goals, which allows us to deeply invest and drive towards the outcomes of our clients.
- Love your craft • We love diving into a variety of domains and solving problems. We take pride in delivering value, in communicating progress, and guiding our clients to success.
At Focused, our Engineers are both practitioners and experts in their craft. This role would play a crucial role in shaping and implementing engineering best practices and ensuring the successful delivery of complex software projects. With clients, we develop trust and influence - we are unintimidated and unintimidating. With colleagues, we set the standard for how we deliver success for clients.
What would you be doing?
- Writing lots of code
- Delivering features end to end across the stack, from backend services and APIs to modern web UIs.
- Pair program daily with teammates and clients to share knowledge, improve code quality, and grow together.
- Practice TDD and continuous refactoring to ensure code is reliable, maintainable, and understandable.
- Build APIs with FastAPI, Express, or similar, with clear schemas and validation using tools like Pydantic, JSON Schema, or zod.
- Containerize, deploy, and monitor apps in the cloud using Docker, CI/CD pipelines, and observability tools like Honeycomb or Datadog.
- Collaborate closely with designers, product managers, and stakeholders to continuously deliver valuable software.
- Help define metrics and run experiments, including A/B tests, so we know what's actually working.
- Stay curious through experimenting with new patterns in the GenAI space, share what works (and what doesn't), and help evolve how we build AI-powered software.
We are excited about you, because you:
- You're a hands-on, full stack engineer with a strong track record of delivering software in collaborative, agile environments.
- You're proficient in Python and/or JS/TypeScript (Ruby or similar works too) and have solid OOP and design fundamentals.
- You understand async/await and the event loop as well as thread-based concurrency, and you know when to use which.
- You believe that code quality matters, and that TDD and pairing help build better systems and stronger teams. You're comfortable with unit and integration tests, regression suites, and CI gates.
- You know your REST fundamentals (HTTP verbs, status codes, CORS) and have modeled data with ORMs like SQLAlchemy, Django ORM, ActiveRecord, or Prisma.
- You can jump into an existing React, Vue, or Svelte frontend and ship changes, with or without a coding agent.
- You've deployed containerized apps to a cloud provider and have a working understanding of IAM, scaling, logging, and observability.
- You've worked directly with clients or product stakeholders and can explain technical work in language anyone can understand.
- You're excited about what's happening in the AI space but stay focused on delivering value.
- You love to share what you're learning and make the team around you better.
Nice to have:
- Exposure to LLM APIs or agent frameworks
- Experience building AI-enabled applications with LangChain and LLMs that deliver production-ready outcomes for clients
- Hands-on experience with LangChain, LangGraph, and LangSmith
If you had worked at Focused over the last 3 months you may have:
- Paired with a teammate to build a FastAPI service with Pydantic validation and solid test coverage
- Tracked down and fixed a race condition in an async background worker
- Refactored a flaky test suite to support continuous delivery with confidence
- Set up Docker Compose for a client team so new devs could get running on day one
- Added tracing in Honeycomb that helped a client find and fix a slow endpoint
- Shipped a React feature in an existing client frontend alongside a coding agent
- Contributed to our internal playbook on building with LLM APIs
- Helped write this job req
What to know before you apply:
- This is a contract-to-hire role. It starts with an 8 week program followed by a one month evaluation period, for a total of about 3 months.
- During the program, you'll be required to earn the LangChain Certified Agent Engineer certification and the Claude Architect certificate.
- Focused is unable to sponsor or take over sponsorship of an employment visa for this program.
- This role requires being in our Chicago office three days per week.
- This is an hourly position for the duration of the contract, with a pay range of $60 to $85 per hour. Final rate will be based on experience and skill level.
