Software Engineer

About Hilo Aviation

Hilo Aviation is building the AI-powered operating system for flight schools. Our platform touches student safety, regulatory compliance, and the daily operations of flight training programs across the country. We’re a small, serious technical team solving problems where “good enough” isn’t acceptable — and we’re growing deliberately.

The Role

We’re hiring a Software Engineer to build and own features across our full-stack platform. You’ll work primarily in Next.js, TypeScript, and PostgreSQL, taking ownership of feature development from design through deployment. This is a high-trust, high-output role on a team that moves fast and cares deeply about what it ships.

We’re not looking for someone to fill tickets. We’re looking for an engineer who takes initiative, thinks about the downstream effects of what they build, and brings enough technical ownership to push back when a design or approach needs reconsidering.

We want the best engineer we can find at any career stage. That might be a recent graduate whose academic work, open-source contributions, or personal projects are demonstrably exceptional. It might be an engineer already in the industry who has a body of delivered work they can speak to in depth. In either case, you need to be able to prove it.

What You’ll Work On

•      Build product features across our Next.js/TypeScript stack, from UI to API to data layer.

•      Collaborate with our AI Dev team on integrating intelligent features into the product experience.

•      Participate in code review, architectural decisions, and the ongoing evolution of our engineering standards.

•      Write tests alongside features — not as an afterthought — and maintain quality gates through our CI/CD pipeline.

•      Document your work in a way that serves the team, not just your memory.

What We’re Looking For

Strong fundamentals in:

·      TypeScript

·      React

·      Next.js

·      PostgreSQL

·      GitHub

·      Vercel, AWS

We also value experience working in a cloud-deployed production environment is highly valued. We’re less focused on years of experience and more focused on the quality and depth of what you’ve built.

We’re open to candidates from two backgrounds:

•      Graduates or researchers with standout academic records, published work, or personal/open-source projects that reflect a genuine engineering standard — not tutorials, but real systems with real design decisions you can articulate and defend.

•      Working engineers who can walk through their deliveries in technical depth: what they built, why it was designed that way, what they’d do differently, and what the outcomes were.

Beyond the technical baseline: we want someone who communicates clearly, handles ambiguity without freezing, and takes quality seriously. Aviation is a safety-critical domain, and the software we build reflects that.

We move fast and we ship often. You're someone who drives toward delivery rather than getting comfortable in research mode — but you also know that speed without discipline creates the kind of debt that slows everything down. We build things right because we plan to build on top of them.

How We Hire

We don’t make offers based on résumés alone. Every candidate will complete a structured technical assessment, submit a portfolio or project review, and participate in an in-depth delivery walkthrough with our engineering team. We’re looking for evidence of how you think and what you ship — not just where you’ve been.

The Structure

Six-month contract with an optional path to full-time employment for the right person. We’re investing in the right people, and we expect that investment to convert. If you’re performing, we want you permanent — this structure gives both sides the confidence to move forward.

Hours: Full-time equivalent (40 hrs/week)

Rate: Competitive — based on demonstrated capability