We're hiring

Build the future of connected print.

We ship NFC and QR products worldwide and resolve 12 million taps a month. Come build the platform that turns a piece of print into a durable digital surface.

Print, alive.

The Ideal Card exists because a business card, a menu, a hangtag, and a shelf-talker are all points of contact — moments where a company and a customer meet — and for decades those moments were dead ink. You handed over paper, and whatever happened next happened offline. We think that is a waste. We think every printed surface should be able to introduce itself, tell you where it came from, take a review, ship an order, or hand off a lead — the moment somebody touches it. So we build the NFC chips, the QR routing, the dashboard analytics, the print supply chain, and the industry-specific templates that make that possible.

Since 2021 we have grown from three co-founders in a Long Island City studio to a 90-person team operating out of a New York headquarters and a fully-remote engineering org spread across four US time zones. We have shipped more than 500,000 physical units. We power tap-to-connect experiences for real estate teams, salons, restaurants, event organizers, and enterprise sales floors. We are profitable, growing at roughly 140% year over year, and independently owned. That last detail matters: we do not have a board that will force us to trade the product's soul for a growth curve.

Our culture is opinionated and specific. We are a company of makers who care about the physical object and the digital service in equal measure. We are unusually candid — feedback here is direct, structured, and delivered fast. We are not a hustle-culture shop; we ship five days a week, close the laptop at 6, and expect people to have lives that include children, chosen family, weeknight ceramics classes, and Wednesday-morning long runs. We are calm about deadlines because we plan quarters carefully, and loud about wins because celebrating them is how a team stays whole.

What we look for, more than any specific credential, is a person with taste, judgment, and a bias toward finishing things. Taste, because the difference between a great NFC business card and a bad one is a thousand small choices about weight, edge finish, animation timing, and copy voice, and only someone with taste will make those choices well. Judgment, because we ship physical goods on a global supply chain, and a wrong call at the print vendor costs us a container full of unsellable inventory. And a bias toward finishing, because print does not tolerate 80% — the moment a card leaves the plant, it is out in the world forever.

The five things we say to each other.

Ship the object.

The card in the customer's hand is the product. A dashboard feature that doesn't show up on a physical surface is a lower-priority investment.

Numbers are cheap. Judgment is scarce.

We run experiments and read data, but we hire people who can call a decision without waiting for the significance test.

Direct, then kind.

Feedback lands in the same meeting the observation happened. We are not a company that stores up complaints for reviews.

Boring platforms, exciting products.

The redirect edge, the provisioning API, the print pipeline — all should feel dull, predictable, five-nines reliable. The features on top of them are where we take swings.

Weekends belong to you.

Sunday-night Slack is a smell. If a person is on-call it is scheduled, compensated, and rotated.

What we offer.

Health, dental, vision.

Aetna PPO with 100% employee premium coverage and 80% dependent coverage. Dental and vision from day one.

401(k) with 4% match.

Immediate vesting. Traditional and Roth options via Guideline. No waiting period.

Remote-hybrid, real.

NYC HQ is anchor for design, ops, and exec. Engineering is fully remote across US time zones. Two in-person offsites a year, all expenses covered.

$2,500 equipment stipend.

Refreshed every three years. Laptop, monitor, chair, standing desk, headphones — your call.

$1,800 learning budget.

Conferences, books, courses, coaching. Books ordered through our shared library remain company property; everything else is yours.

16 weeks parental leave.

Fully paid, for birthing and non-birthing parents, adoption, and foster placement. Phased return-to-work available.

Unlimited PTO with a floor.

15-day minimum enforced. Leadership publishes their own use. Company shuts down the last week of December.

Equity for everyone.

ISOs on a four-year vest with a one-year cliff. Refresh grants in years two and beyond based on impact.

Wellness stipend.

$85/month for gym, therapy, meditation apps, ergonomic gear — reimbursed monthly, no receipts justified past submission.

We are hiring across the org.

Thirteen roles open right now. If your dream role is not listed but you know how you would contribute, write us anyway — the "General application" link at the bottom lands in the same inbox as targeted applications and receives the same read.

Senior Full-Stack Engineer

NYC / HybridEngineeringFull-time$175K–$225K + equity
Apply

Own features across our Rails 7 + Next.js 14 stack. You'll spend a typical week shipping a dashboard flow used by 480,000 cardholders, then dropping into the provisioning API to add a new NFC chip variant, then pairing with a designer on the animation curve for a tap confirmation. Our stack is deliberately conservative: PostgreSQL, Redis, Sidekiq, a Go redirect edge, and a Swift + Kotlin mobile pair. You'll write real code four days a week, take on a rotating on-call shift roughly once every six weeks, and mentor two mid-level engineers through the platform team's coaching rhythm. We look for engineers with five-plus years shipping consumer products at real scale, a genuine bias toward reading production logs before opening a debugger, and enthusiasm for the physical-goods context (or at least tolerance for hearing about print run tolerances at all-hands).

Staff iOS Engineer

NYC / HybridEngineeringFull-time$190K–$245K + equity
Apply

Lead the iOS app that our cardholders use to provision, personalize, and read tap analytics for their smart products. This is a CoreNFC-heavy role: you'll own the tap-to-write flows, App Clips for tap-to-connect experiences, background NFC scanning under iOS 17+, and the shared Swift package that both our consumer app and our enterprise scanner app depend on. You'll pair regularly with our Kotlin lead to keep parity, and set the architecture direction for a two-person iOS team growing to five in 2026. We want a Staff-level engineer with a decade of Apple platforms experience, comfort in SwiftUI and the older UIKit surfaces our older customers still touch, and the diplomatic patience to argue with Apple review on our behalf.

Senior Backend Engineer, Redirect Edge

Remote (US)EngineeringFull-time$180K–$230K + equity
Apply

Own the Go-based redirect edge that resolves every NFC tap and QR scan our cardholders generate — currently 40 million taps a month at a sub-80ms p99 measured from the mobile browser side, with dynamic destination logic (geo, time-of-day, campaign, A/B), pixel firing, and event streaming into ClickHouse. You'll set capacity, hunt tail latency, redesign the routing hot path when a new product SKU forces it, and set the SLO conversation with our SRE lead. We look for engineers who have shipped a distributed system at real request volume, understand the difference between p50 and p99 (and why we care about p99.9), and are comfortable saying "no, that feature ships behind a queue, not in the hot path."

Senior DevOps / SRE Engineer

Remote (US)EngineeringFull-time$185K–$240K + equity
Apply

Own reliability for the redirect edge, the dashboard API, and the NFC provisioning service. Our infra is AWS + Terraform + EKS + Datadog, with a healthy skepticism about adding new tools. You will lead incident response, run monthly game days, negotiate error-budget spend with product leadership, and design the capacity plan for a 3x scan-volume year. You'll be the second SRE hire, reporting to our VP Engineering, and paired with the current SRE on a two-week overlapping on-call rotation. We want somebody who has been the on-call SRE for a product that generates real revenue, and who can write a post-mortem that a founder reads all the way through.

Senior Product Designer

NYC / HybridDesignFull-time$160K–$205K + equity
Apply

Design the dashboard, mobile, and enterprise-admin experiences that live behind every card we ship. This is a full product role: you'll run discovery interviews with real estate teams and restaurant operators, sketch flows, prototype in Figma, ship pixels with a partnering engineer, and measure adoption after launch. Our design system is small but strict; you'll extend it with intent and hold the line when a feature request would break its logic. You'll partner with our Head of Design and one other senior designer, and mentor a mid-level designer joining in Q1. We want a designer with seven-plus years of shipped consumer product work, a portfolio that reads like a set of decisions rather than a set of screens, and instincts about physical print — packaging, edge finishes, weight — that show up in the digital work.

Product Manager, Platform

NYC / HybridProductFull-time$170K–$215K + equity
Apply

Own the platform roadmap: cardholder dashboard, tap analytics, integrations, and the growing set of admin surfaces we ship to enterprise customers. This is a two-year-old team hitting its stride — you'll set quarterly priorities against a mixed input of enterprise sales asks, mid-market cardholder feedback, and platform debt. You'll partner with two engineers, a designer, and the customer success team. We want a PM with five-plus years shipping SaaS platforms, a written communication style clear enough that engineers do not need to ask three follow-up questions before starting, and enough backbone to say "not this quarter" to a friendly enterprise CSM.

Enterprise Account Executive

Remote (US)SalesFull-time$140K–$170K base + uncapped
Apply

Sell The Ideal Card platform to enterprise buyers — real estate brokerages, hospitality groups, franchise systems, and large sales organizations, typically 500 seats and up. This is a full-cycle role: you'll prospect, run discovery, demo the platform, walk through the ROI model, negotiate MSA and DPA with procurement, and stay involved through implementation. Territory is US. You'll join two other Enterprise AEs and report to our VP Sales. We look for AEs with five-plus years of enterprise SaaS closing experience, a clean quota-attainment track record, comfort in a physical-goods-plus-software motion (there is a supply chain conversation on every deal), and the willingness to travel roughly one week a month to prospect events.

Growth Marketing Manager

NYC / HybridMarketingFull-time$130K–$165K + equity
Apply

Own paid acquisition, lifecycle, and SEO. You'll run our Google, Meta, and LinkedIn spend (currently $180K/month blended, growing), build the lifecycle nurture programs that convert free trials into paying accounts, and partner with our content lead on the SEO program that drives one-third of top-of-funnel. You'll report to our VP Marketing, work daily with our Head of Content, and own a monthly performance review of the top ten campaign variants. We want a growth manager with four-plus years of paid + lifecycle experience in a consumer or prosumer SaaS shop, comfort in Amplitude and Braze, and a strong sense of when to stop optimizing and rewrite the creative.

Content Marketing Lead

Remote (US)MarketingFull-time$125K–$155K + equity
Apply

Lead editorial for blog, case studies, whitepapers, video, and the growing podcast we launched last spring. You will own the content calendar, brief and edit our two staff writers, work directly with product and CS on the case-study pipeline, and set the SEO topic strategy against our growth team's keyword model. You'll partner with our Head of Design on the visual system for editorial. We want a content leader with seven-plus years of B2B experience, a portfolio that includes both scaled programmatic SEO and long-form work that read like real writing, and a firm point of view on when to publish nothing and let the calendar breathe.

Customer Success Manager, Mid-Market

Remote (US)Customer SuccessFull-time$115K–$145K + variable
Apply

Own a book of 60-90 mid-market accounts (typically $15K-$150K ARR: regional real estate teams, hotel groups, franchise HQs). You'll run the 90-day onboarding, quarterly business reviews, feature-adoption plays, and renewal conversations. You'll partner with Support on escalations, and work closely with product on the feedback loop back to the roadmap. Reports to our Head of CS. We look for CSMs with four-plus years of SaaS success, comfort in a physical-goods motion (customers care about reorders and print quality, not just software), and enough sales instinct to own an expansion conversation without needing an AE in the room.

Manufacturing Operations Lead

NYC / HybridOperationsFull-time$135K–$170K + equity
Apply

Own the print + NFC-embed supply chain that ships our physical products. We work with four contract manufacturers across the US, Poland, and Vietnam. You'll manage vendor relationships, quality inspection cadence, throughput planning against the sales team's forecast, and cost negotiations. You'll partner with our Head of Product on new SKU launches (materials sourcing, tooling, first-article approval). This is a job where the details matter — a wrong call on adhesive tolerance costs us a batch. We want an ops leader with seven-plus years of consumer physical goods experience, ideally in printed or embedded electronics, and the comfort to fly to a factory on 48 hours notice.

Data Engineer

Remote (US)EngineeringFull-time$165K–$210K + equity
Apply

Own the analytics warehouse — Snowflake + dbt + Fivetran — that powers cardholder-facing tap analytics, internal BI dashboards, and the growing set of ML features (fraud detection on scan patterns, next-best-action for CSMs) our data science team is prototyping. You'll partner with product on data contracts, with finance on the revenue cube, and with our SRE on the ClickHouse-to-Snowflake pipeline that carries scan events into the warehouse. We want a data engineer with five-plus years of production experience, opinionated views on dbt project structure, and the patience to write documentation that people actually read.

Support Engineer

Remote (US)Customer SuccessFull-time$85K–$115K + variable
Apply

Front-line technical support for cardholders and admins — mostly around NFC provisioning issues, browser-quirk redirect debugging, and dashboard "why is this number what it is" questions. You'll triage tickets in Intercom, escalate real bugs to engineering with clean reproductions, ship documentation to the help center, and build the internal tooling that lets Support answer 80% of tickets without paging engineering. Reports to our Head of Support. We want a technical support engineer with three-plus years of SaaS experience, comfort reading server logs and browser dev tools, and enough writing craft to produce a help article a customer actually finishes.

How we hire.

Our loop is designed to be short, respectful of your time, and grounded in real work. We aim for a first-response within three business days of application and a final decision within three weeks of the first interview. We pay for take-home work above two hours.

01

Application read

A recruiter and the hiring manager both read every application within three business days. If there is a fit, we move to the next step.

02

Recruiter screen (30 min)

Values fit, role framing, comp expectations, timeline. If either side sees a mismatch, we say so.

03

Hiring-manager conversation (45 min)

Closer look on your recent work, the specific challenges of the role, and what a great first ninety days looks like.

04

Work sample or on-site (2-4 hours)

Engineering: a paid, three-hour take-home plus a live pairing session. Design: portfolio walkthrough plus a design critique. Sales: a mock discovery + demo. CS: a scenario review.

05

Cross-functional panel (3 × 45 min)

You meet three people you'd work with weekly. Structured questions, written scoring, no gotchas.

06

Founder or exec conversation (30 min)

A short conversation with a founder or your skip-level. Two-way — you should leave with your remaining questions answered.

07

References + offer

We ask for two references and call both. Offer conversations are held over video, and we send the written offer within 24 hours.

The specifics of our commitment.

Diversity work at a small company is easy to signal and hard to do. We try to be specific about what we actually do. Sixty-two percent of the current team identifies as women, non-binary, or another gender minority. Forty-eight percent identify as Black, Indigenous, Latine, or another underrepresented racial or ethnic group. Our engineering department is majority-women, which is unusual, and which we have worked hard to keep that way as we scale. Nine percent of the team is trans or non-binary, and our health coverage includes gender-affirming care. Every offer we extend is benchmarked against a public compensation band that is the same for every candidate at that level — the band is documented in the offer letter, and we do not negotiate below it.

Our hiring loop has structured questions and written scoring, and we require at least two people from underrepresented groups on every panel. We run panel-training every quarter with an outside facilitator. We publish demographic reports internally at every all-hands, and externally on our About page annually. We are honest about what is not yet where we want it to be — our senior leadership is 44% women and 22% BIPOC, and we intend to move both numbers.

If any part of our process is inaccessible to you, tell us. We accommodate for disabilities, caregiving obligations, timezone differences, and interview anxiety. The candidate experience we want to run is one where you can do your best work in the loop, not one where you spend energy translating around the process.

Written by

the Ideal Card team

The team leads recruiting, DEI, and people operations. Before joining The Ideal Card in 2023, she ran talent at a mid-stage consumer hardware startup and spent seven years in HR at Estée Lauder. She is based in Brooklyn.

Ready to build the future of connected print with us?

Every application gets read within three business days. Every candidate hears back either way.

careers@theidealcard.com
AI