Full Stack Engineer - Platform (Junior)
littlefish
Software Engineering
Sterling, VA, USA · Remote
Posted on May 11, 2026
About littlefish
littlefish is a Unified Commerce Platform for small and medium businesses across Africa, distributed through Financial Institution partners — banks, telcos, and insurers. We are live with 3 of the 5 major South African banks and onboarding 10–12 FI clients across the continent. The platform gives SMEs access to payments, invoicing, stock management, and expense management — tools previously only available to large corporations.
We are an AI-native engineering team. Every engineer operates as an Intent Architect: directing AI with precision, owning every decision about correctness, security, and quality, and building software that impacts real businesses across Africa. We are not vibe coders. The AI accelerates execution. The engineering judgment is yours.
Role Summary
The Junior Full Stack Engineer is the entry point into the Platform Engineering track. You will work on real production code across the littlefish stack — .NET / C# services, React portals, and Flutter mobile apps — under the direction of senior Platform Engineers and the Principal Architect.
The expectation is not that you arrive as a fully-formed Intent Architect. It is that you arrive hungry to become one. You will be given real ownership early, paired with the engineers who set the standard, and held to the same quality bar everyone else ships against. AI tooling is core to how we work; learning to direct it well is part of the job, not an optional extra.
Key Responsibilities
Building and Shipping
Build features under guidance across C# / .NET services, React frontends, and Flutter mobile components — most often a defined slice of a larger feature owned by a senior engineer.
Use AI tooling actively — directing it with intent, reviewing its output critically, and being able to explain the code you submit, line by line, regardless of who or what generated it.
Write unit and integration tests, and learn to identify the failure modes that matter, not just the happy path.
Submit clean, reviewable pull requests.
Solution Design Participation
Participate in technical design discussions — ask questions, surface assumptions, learn how senior engineers decompose problems before they prompt.
Contribute to design artefacts (API contracts, data models, sequence diagrams) under senior guidance.
Begin developing the architectural instinct that defines an Intent Architect — thinking about boundaries, constraints, and failure modes before writing or generating code.
Code Review and Learning
Have your work reviewed substantively, and act on the feedback — review is the primary mechanism through which you grow into the role.
Begin reviewing peer pull requests once you have the context.
Take ownership of the gaps in your knowledge — fintech domain concepts, distributed systems patterns, cloud fundamentals, AI tooling fluency.
Platform and Domain Awareness
Build a working understanding of the platform's architecture and the GKE / GCP environment that hosts it — enough to deploy, observe, and debug your own work.
Develop awareness of the regulatory and security context of fintech: why idempotency, tenant isolation, and secrets handling matter.
Ask questions about the FI partner context, the SME use case, and the product goal — curiosity about the business is part of the job from day one.
Collaboration and Delivery
Work in cross-functional squads alongside Product, Design, QA, and senior Platform Engineers.
Participate in agile ceremonies and be visible about what you are working on, where you are stuck, and what you have learned.
Contribute to internal documentation as you build context — junior engineers often see clearly what senior engineers have stopped noticing.
Skills and Qualifications
Experience
0–3 years of professional software development experience, or a strong recent graduate / bootcamp / self-taught equivalent with a demonstrable portfolio.
Working proficiency in C# or another modern strongly-typed language (Java, TypeScript, Go) — fundamentals matter more than years on .NET specifically.
Working familiarity with React — you have built something real with it and can navigate a component-driven codebase.
Comfortable with Git, pull request workflow, and basic CI/CD concepts.
Practical exposure to relational or document databases — writing queries, reasoning about schemas.
Hands-on experience using AI coding tools (Claude, Copilot, Cursor, or similar) and able to articulate what you have learned about using them well.
Fintech exposure is a plus, not required.
Technical Skills
Backend: C# / .NET (or strong adjacent language fundamentals), HTTP / REST, JSON, async/await.
Frontend: React with TypeScript, HTML5 / CSS3, component-driven architecture and state management basics.
Mobile (welcome but not required): any prior Flutter / Dart, Kotlin, or Swift exposure is a bonus.
Data: SQL fluency, basic understanding of relational vs document data models.
Cloud awareness: conceptual understanding of cloud platforms and containers — depth welcome but not expected.
AI tooling: practical familiarity with AI-assisted development, and self-awareness about its limits — you can describe a time it produced something that looked right but was wrong, and what you did about it.
Disposition and Behaviours
Curious — about the code, the system, and the business problem.
Accountable — you own everything you ship, including what AI generated.
Coachable — you take feedback as input, apply it, come back better.
Honest about uncertainty — you say "I don't know yet," then go find out.
Aware of the weight of the work — when the platform is down, SMEs cannot trade.
Hungry to grow into an Intent Architect — you understand the bar is high and want to be held to it.
To apply, please send your CV and a short note on why littlefish to hiring@littlefishapp.com. We do not require cover letters, but we do want to know what draws you to this role specifically — curiosity about the problem is part of what we are hiring for.
