Full-Stack Engineer
ABOUT US
We are a Prishtina-based company and a subsidiary of Firma.ch AG in Zug, Switzerland. We are at the very beginning — the brand exists, the strategy is set, and the product is being built now.
THE ROLE
You are joining as one of the first engineers, working directly with our Tech Lead. The core platform is still in its early stages and you will have a direct influence on how it is built. There is no legacy system to maintain and no backlog inherited from someone else.
This is a small team, so the role is genuinely full stack. You will write the API, the database queries, and the interface the user sees, and you will be the one who fixes it when it breaks in production.
What makes the problem interesting is scale and geography. A directory lives or dies on how fast and how accurately people can find things. We are dealing with large volumes of business records, map-based search across five countries, and an interface that has to work in three languages on a phone with a weak connection.
WHAT YOU WILL WORK ON
- The core directory: search, filtering, categories, and map-based discovery of businesses across Kosovo, Albania, Switzerland, Germany, and Austria
- Business profiles and the dashboard where owners manage their listing, photos, opening hours, and services
- Data ingestion and deduplication pipelines — importing and cleaning business records from public registries and other sources at volume
- Search infrastructure: relevance, geospatial queries, and keeping response times low as the dataset grows
- Internationalisation across Albanian, German, and English, including how content and URLs are structured for search engines
- Reviews, verification, and the trust mechanics that make a listing believable
- Payments and subscription handling for paid business profiles
- Performance and SEO fundamentals: server-side rendering, Core Web Vitals, structured data
OUR STACK
You do not need to have used all of it, but you should be able to argue about most of it. Some of it is not decided yet — if you have built something like this before, we want your opinion.
- TypeScript across the whole codebase
- Next.js and React on the front end, Tailwind CSS for styling
- Node.js on the back end, REST and tRPC
- PostgreSQL with PostGIS for geospatial queries
- MapLibre GL for map components
- Background jobs for the import and deduplication pipeline
- Git, GitHub Actions, containerised deployments
Still open, and you may be the one who decides: ORM (Prisma or Drizzle), search engine (Postgres full-text vs. Typesense or Meilisearch), auth, hosting.
WHAT WE ARE LOOKING FOR
Required
- Real projects you have built and shipped — applications that people actually used, and where you can explain why you built them the way you did. We are not counting years.
- Solid JavaScript and TypeScript, and comfort on both sides of the stack
- Real SQL skills: you can read a slow query, understand why it is slow, and fix it
- Experience with a modern front-end framework and an understanding of what actually makes a page fast
- Git discipline and the habit of writing code other people can read six months later
- The ability to work through a problem on your own, and the judgement to ask before going too far in the wrong direction
- Albanian and good English — our documentation, code, and commits are in English
- The willingness to say when something is a bad idea. In a team this size, quiet agreement is expensive
If you are self-taught, still studying, or coming from a different stack — Vue, Laravel, Django, .NET — apply anyway and tell us how you would get up to speed.
Nice to have
- Geospatial work: PostGIS, map libraries, or location-based search
- Search engines such as Elasticsearch, Meilisearch, or Typesense
- Experience with large data imports, scraping, or record deduplication
- Payment integrations (Stripe or similar) and subscription logic
- SEO-relevant engineering: SSR, sitemaps, structured data, multilingual routing
- Basic DevOps: CI/CD, monitoring, cloud infrastructure
- German language skills
WHAT WE OFFER
- A greenfield codebase and a real say in the architecture — decisions made in the first months will still be visible in three years
- A product that a community actually uses, not internal software nobody sees
- Eligible employees may participate in the Swiss parent company's Employee Stock Option Plan (ESOP)
- 20 days of paid annual leave plus public holidays
- Office in central Prishtina, working hours 08:00 – 16:00, Monday to Friday. We work together from our office because we believe great products are built through close collaboration, especially in the early stages of a company.
- Hardware of your choice and a budget for tools, courses, and conferences
- Short decision paths: the founder is one message away, not four layers up
HOW TO APPLY
Send your CV and a link to your GitHub, GitLab, or any code you can show to info@firma.ch with the subject line “Full-Stack Engineer — Your Name”.
Instead of a cover letter, answer briefly:
- Send us one piece of code you wrote, and be ready to explain the decisions behind it.
- Describe the bug that took you the longest to find. How did you finally solve it?
- A search page listing businesses near a user has become slow as the database grew past 100,000 records. Where would you look first?
