Job Description
Who We Are
The Motley Fool is a purpose-driven financial services company on a mission to make the world smarter, happier, and richer. For 30 years, we’ve been helping people make better investment decisions through transparency, education, and a healthy dose of Foolish fun. We’re a fast-moving, collaborative team that values high-quality work, curiosity, and initiative. We care deeply about what we do, and we’re driven by the impact our work has on real people’s financial futures.
With a growing portfolio of 50+ subscription products, we’re investing heavily in the technology that powers Fool.com — one of the most widely read financial sites on the web — and the systems that turn readers into long-term members.
What Does This Team Do?
The Fool.com team owns the public-facing experience that millions of readers, search engine crawlers, and prospective subscribers hit every day. Today, the team is strong on the client side: we have two excellent front-end engineers shipping interface work. We’re looking for an engineer who can own the server-side and infrastructure layer of the site alongside them.
About the Role
This is a full-stack role with a clear weighting toward the parts of the system that run before pixels reach the browser — API integrations, server-rendered routes, caching, observability, deployment, and the SEO-critical surface that determines how millions of crawler requests resolve. Much of fool.com is server side rendered.
What You’ll Do
- Build and maintain server-side features in our Next.js App Router codebase using TypeScript — route handlers, server components, server actions, streaming, ISR, and revalidation strategy.
- Design and harden integrations with the third-party APIs that power our content, market data, and subscription experiences. We care a lot about doing this well: timeouts, retries, circuit breakers, fallbacks, and graceful degradation when upstream services misbehave are first-class concerns, not afterthoughts.
- Own caching strategy across Redis and Cloudflare, balancing freshness against performance, cost, and crawler behavior.
- Deploy and operate services on AWS using Docker, with first-class instrumentation in DataDog so we catch issues before our readers and crawlers do.
- Write meaningful end-to-end coverage with Microsoft Playwright for the flows that matter most.
- Optimize the site for the way it’s actually consumed by SEO crawlers: rendering strategy, structured data, sitemap generation, canonicalization, hreflang, robots directives, performance budgets, and crawl budget management.
- Partner with our front-end engineers on the seam between server and client, and collaborate with content, marketing, SEO, and platform teams across the company.
- Use AI-assisted development tools (Claude Code, Cursor) as a core part of your daily workflow — we have a company-wide commitment to use the latest tooling and workflows to make every person as impactful as possible.
- Integrate with our CMS for content management
What We’re Looking For
- 5+ years of professional software engineering experience, with meaningful time spent on the server side of a production web application.
- Strong TypeScript and Next.js experience, including the App Router, server components, route handlers, ISR, and streaming.
- Demonstrated track record integrating third-party APIs in production, with clear opinions about how to do it safely. You’ve debugged a flaky upstream at 11pm and you have views about it.
- Solid grounding in caching (Redis or equivalent) and CDN behavior (Cloudflare or equivalent), including cache invalidation, stale-while-revalidate patterns, and edge vs. origin tradeoffs.
- Comfort with AWS, Docker, and modern CI/CD workflows.
- Working knowledge of how SEO crawlers actually see a site: how Googlebot renders JavaScript, what causes soft 404s, how canonical and hreflang tags affect indexing, what Core Web Vitals look like in CrUX vs. lab data, and how to think about crawl budget on a large site.
- Production observability instincts — you reach for DataDog dashboards, logs, and traces before guessing.
- Experience writing maintainable end-to-end tests with Playwright, Cypress, or similar.
Bonus Points
- Background on a high-traffic content, media, or publishing site where SEO is a primary acquisition channel.
- Hands-on work with structured data (JSON-LD, schema.org), automated sitemaps, Search Console, or auditing tools like Screaming Frog.
- Familiarity with analytics and event pipelines (Segment, PostHog, GTM, or similar).
- Prior work on subscription, paywall, or e-commerce flows.
- Genuine interest in financial markets, investing, or fintech — we’re a company of people who care about this stuff.
Why This Role
You’ll be the person who makes Fool.com faster, safer, and more observable on the side of the wire that most users never see. You’ll work alongside two strong front-end engineers who are eager to have a real partner across the seam, and you’ll do it on a team that takes engineering quality seriously — we’ve recently invested in standardizing error-handling practices around external services, AI-assisted development tooling, and cross-repository coding guidelines.
If you like the parts of full-stack engineering that happen behind the scenes — the integrations, the caching layer, the crawler surface, the dashboards at 2am — we’d love to talk.
Please note, no sponsorship is available for this position. You must reside in, or be willing to relocate to, one of these states for employment: Alabama, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Oregon, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, Washington DC, and Wisconsin.
Below you’ll see a few of our perks, but check out our Careers Site for the complete list:
- Flexible, remote work environment (*see our open states above)
- No “vacation policy” (not to be confused with a “No vacation” policy)
- Generous fully-paid parental leave
- $1,000 annually to invest in stocks of your choice
- Super low premiums for medical, dental, and vision coverage
- Comprehensive compensation package, including company equity
Annual Pay Range
$165,000—$185,000 USD
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