About the Eames Institute

The Eames Institute of Infinite Curiosity is a nonprofit public charity dedicated to advancing the dynamic legacy of 20th-century designers Ray and Charles Eames. By sharing the things the Eameses made and loved, along with their joyful and rigorous approach to life and work, we seek to inspire creative problem-solving that positively shapes our world. 

With our vast collections, digital and print offerings, an extensive program of events, and the Eames Ranch, we aim to demonstrate the enduring value of the Eameses’ philosophy and invite people to explore their curiosity, ask questions, and implement creative solutions to the challenges of today.

About the Role

The Full-Stack Engineer will strengthen and evolve the Eames Institute’s digital ecosystem, including eamesinstitute.org, curated microsites, and supporting services such as Sanity Studio, Astro-based front ends, and shared Node/TypeScript packages. Reporting to and working closely with the Director of Digital Development in the codebase and system architecture, this role contributes to technical strategy and implementation in partnership with the Digital Design Lead, content teams, and external collaborators to deliver thoughtful, accessible, high-performing, and design-forward experiences that express the Institute’s mission.

Designed to expand the Institute’s technical capacity and resilience, this role shares implementation responsibility across projects, supports parallel workstreams, and enables deeper focus across both product and infrastructure. The ideal candidate pairs deep technical rigor with a sensitivity to craft and design, enjoys small cross-functional teams, and moves comfortably between front-end polish and back-end integration, bringing hands-on curiosity to debugging and performance tuning.

Key Responsibilities:

Web Development & Engineering

• Build and iterate on Astro/React-driven web properties, ensuring responsive layouts, semantic HTML, WCAG-aligned accessibility, and cross-browser performance.
• Implement features and integrations informed by product briefs, CMS schemas, and analytics needs, maintaining clean, well-documented code with pragmatic automated tests.
• Extend shared component libraries, design systems, and front-end foundations (CSS/SCSS, tokens, UI patterns) in partnership with the Director of Digital Development and Digital Design Lead to maintain consistency and scalability.
• Build, theme, and optimize Shopify and membership/donation flows using external APIs, supporting secure authentication, data privacy, and personalized user experiences.
• Support the Digital Analytics Manager with growth engineering needs including tag implementation, event tracking, data layer design, and conversion schema.

Architecture & Systems

• Contribute to technical architecture decisions, documenting tradeoffs around scalability, cost, performance, and maintainability.
• Implement and maintain integrations between our headless CMS, APIs, analytics, CRM, and experimentation tools.
• Share responsibility for CI/CD pipelines and environments (Turbo, pnpm, CircleCI, Vercel), troubleshooting build issues and monitoring Core Web Vitals and error reporting.
• Monitor uptime, performance, and reliability; participate in incident response, root-cause analysis, and continuous improvement of security and stability.

Collaboration & Innovation

• Partner with the Digital Design Lead and creative teams to translate creative and editorial concepts into feasible technical plans, flagging risks and opportunities early.
• Pair regularly with the Director of Digital Development to review architecture, co-develop solutions, and align sprint priorities across teams.
• Support other teams in evaluating and implementing digital tools and workflows (e.g., visitor agreements, scheduling, data capture).
• Share learnings on emerging frameworks, structured data, modern CSS, and accessibility standards.
• Explore and apply AI-assisted development tools, balancing quality, security, and maintainability.
• Work with external contractors as needed to ensure code quality and continuity.

Required Education, Skills, Abilities and Competencies:

• 5+ years of professional full-stack development with demonstrable launches of content-rich, design-led web applications.
• Advanced JavaScript/TypeScript, React, and modern meta-frameworks (Astro, Next.js, Remix), with strong Node.js skills, experience with headless CMS platforms (e.g., Sanity), API integration (REST/GraphQL), Git-based workflows, and CI/CD/cloud deployment (Vercel, Netlify, AWS).
• Experience architecting and maintaining scalable systems and component libraries, implementing analytics/SEO/structured data, and diagnosing performance or cross-browser issues.
• Experience collaborating with analytics or growth teams on tagging plans, event design, and implementation of tracking frameworks is strongly preferred.
• Demonstrated commitment to accessibility best practices (WCAG), secure coding, uptime and dependency management, and participation in incident response and retrospectives.
• Proven ability to collaborate in a shared codebase with senior technical leadership, including peer review, pair programming, and openness to AI-assisted development workflows.
• Interest in sustainable design, storytelling, or educational experiences.
• Experience in museums, cultural institutions, or design-focused organizations is a plus.
• Based in the San Francisco Bay Area with the ability to work on-site.

Essential Functions:

• This position is expected to be primarily onsite at one of the Institute’s three main properties (Petaluma, Richmond, or occasionally San Francisco), working Monday-Friday 9-5pm. Infrequent evening/weekend work as needed. Occasional lite travel may be required for company events or training.
• Prolonged periods of sitting at a desk and working on a computer.
• Frequent use of hands for typing, writing, and handling office equipment.
• Occasional standing, walking, bending, or reaching within the office environment.
• Regular use of vision abilities including close vision, color vision, and ability to adjust focus.
• Ability to communicate effectively with others via phone, video conference, and in person.
• May require occasional travel between office locations or for business meetings.

What We Offer: 

• Salary range for this role is $115,000 - $140,000
• The Eames Institute offers a competitive benefits package, including…
• Medical, Dental, Vision and Life Insurance
• 401k employer match
• Commuting benefits
• Wellness stipend (annual) 
• Professional development stipend (annual) 
• $500 match for charitable giving, for every year of service up to five years
• Unlimited paid time off policy in addition to fourteen paid holidays

This job description is intended to describe the general requirements for the performance of this job.  It is not a complete statement of duties, responsibilities or requirements.  Other duties not listed here may be assigned by your manager.

U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Statement

The Eames Institute values diversity, inclusion & belonging for all, and is proud to be an Equal Employment Opportunity employer. We strive to create a workplace that empowers people of all backgrounds, identities, and experiences to feel respected, valued, and able to contribute at the highest level. If you’re excited by this role but your professional experience doesn’t perfectly align with the qualifications listed, we still encourage you to apply.