Senior React and Django Engineer

Senior Django + React Engineer — Marketplace Infrastructure (Ongoing Contract) About the work Radius is a booking platform for midterm housing — traveling professionals, relocations, and insurance-displacement stays. The product is live with paying customers, active marketplace supply, and an ongoing pilot with a major insurance housing company. We're past MVP. The work now is making the system operationally boring: reliable async processing, consistent availability data, resilient payments, and deployment confidence. We're looking for a contractor who can own an infrastructure area end to end rather than take tickets. Stack Django 5.1 + DRF Postgres 16 React 19 / Vite / Tailwind Stripe Connect Leaflet / Mapbox + Supercluster Problem areas you'd work on Async infrastructure — moving long-running workflows and webhook processing into a reliable async architecture with real discipline around retries, observability, and failure handling. Calendar consistency — availability reconciliation across OTA drift, direct bookings, and external integrations. Locking strategies, idempotency, consistency guarantees. Payments and payouts — Stripe Connect workflows for installment payments, payouts, reconciliation, and replayable webhook processing. Search and discovery — scalable geo-query infrastructure (PostGIS, OpenSearch, or similar) with fast map interaction across large inventory sets. Testing and deploy safety — automated testing, regression detection, safe deploys, reducing blast radius. LLM-assisted development speeds up iteration, which makes this matter more, not less. Infrastructure — CI/CD, observability, logging, declarative infra (Terraform, Pulumi, AWS CDK, or similar). Tools listed are directional, not predetermined. Sound judgment beats attachment to a specific stack. Requirements 6+ years building and operating production systems — marketplaces, booking platforms, fintech, logistics, or similarly operationally complex products Deep Django + Postgres: indexing, query optimization, connection management, data modeling, migrations Event-driven systems experience: async workflows, queues, webhook ingestion, idempotent consumers, distributed-system edge cases — and knowing when simplicity wins Comfortable shipping across backend and frontend boundaries Pragmatic use of LLMs in your engineering workflow Written English strong enough to work asynchronously with minimal supervision Overlap of at least 4 hours per working day with US Central time Nice to have PostGIS or geospatial systems Stripe Connect platform work OTA or channel-manager integrations (Hospitable, Guesty, etc.) GitOps / declarative infrastructure AWS or GCP at production scale Engagement Fully remote, hourly through Upwork hours per week to start, with room to expand Long-term intent — we're looking for someone who stays with the codebase, not a one-off build Starts with a small paid scoped project (roughly [X] hours) so we can both evaluate fit before committing to ongoing hours You'll work directly with the founder. Decisions get made same-day. First 30 days looks like Push to production in week one Understand the booking and payments flows Take ownership of one infrastructure area from the list above Measurably improve reliability, observability, or deploy confidence To apply Please include in your proposal: A system you've helped scale, and what you learned from it Which area you'd prioritize first — Search, Async, Calendar, or Payments — and why Your experience with Stripe Connect or similar payment platform work A code sample or repo you can share Proposals without answers to these will not be reviewed. We read every application carefully. We're looking for someone who enjoys making complicated systems feel boringly reliable.