Software Engineer — SJBEC
About the Role
Join St. John's Bay Electric Company (SJBEC) as our Software Engineer. SJBEC is the only utility in Próspera, Roatán, providing electricity and water to homes and businesses inside the Próspera ZEDE. We are in turnaround mode: improving operations, reducing losses, and getting ready for on-site solar within the next year. You will own the engineering of our internal portal — the system of record for accounts, meters, readings, contracts, invoices, payments, and KPIs — partnering with our Lead Engineer on architecture and code review, and working alongside the General Manager. You will run independently most of the time.
This is a hands-on role. You will own real systems that touch real money and real customers. The portal is custom-built in TypeScript and React on PostgreSQL, and what you ship directly affects how the company bills, collects, reconciles, and reports.
This is also a startup environment. The team is small, the pace is fast, and ownership is real. You will not have a product manager writing tickets for you, and you will not be insulated from the operational reality of the company. We move on imperfect information, ship fast, and fix what breaks.
Key Responsibilities
Financial Controls & Auditability
Build and maintain audit logging for all financial mutations: invoices, payments, adjustments, rate and fee changes, manual overrides
Move hardcoded fees, taxes, and rates into a versioned, configurable system with effective dates
Ensure every billing decision is reproducible and traceable
Payments & Reconciliation
Build the payments admin dashboard for Stripe, crypto, bank transfer, and manual entries
Build the reconciliation queue for unmatched and partially allocated payments
Implement running credit ledgers, refunds, and partial allocations
Invoice Generation & Billing Runs
Overhaul the current multi-step invoice creation process into a single, auditable workflow
Build the billing run control center with exception detection, approvals, and clean finalization
Add account numbers to outbound invoice emails and clean up customer-facing invoice IDs
Usage, Meters & Loss Tracking
Promote master meters from accounts into a first-class entity (cleaning up AR aging and customer counts)
Build the meter registry as a real CRUD entity with photos, location, condition, and verification history
Build the master-meter reconciliation module for tracking electric and water losses by district and building
Customer Experience
Set up the internationalization framework so the portal can support bilingual EN/ES properly
Build customer-side features: autopay, consumption charts, account statement downloads, off-cycle meter readings with photo capture
Clean up navigation, fix UX bugs (back-button flow, KPI sideboard), and improve the bill design
Integrations & Auth
Integrate the portal with MaintainX for work-order context on accounts, meters, and buildings
Lead the evaluation and overhaul of the current Clerk-based auth flow
Restructure account and profile data to enable proper auditing of customer records
General Technical Guidance
Partner with the Lead Engineer on architecture and code review; operate autonomously on day-to-day implementation
Take ownership of the portal codebase: architecture decisions within scope, technical debt, deployment hygiene
Bring engineering reality to product decisions, prioritization, and trade-offs
Required Qualifications
2+ years of experience building real, production web applications with TypeScript and React on a Node backend
Working experience with PostgreSQL or a similar relational database: migrations, non-trivial queries, data modeling
Demonstrated experience writing code intended to be read and maintained by other engineers (not just personal projects)
Public GitHub or equivalent portfolio with real, recent commits
Fluent in English, both written and spoken. This is required.
Fluent or near-fluent in Spanish, written and spoken
Willing and able to move to Roatán, Honduras full-time
Preferred Qualifications
Experience with financial systems, billing, payments, or utilities
Experience integrating Stripe, crypto payment rails, or similar third-party APIs
Familiarity with react-i18next or internationalization patterns
Experience with Clerk or similar authentication systems
Background in a small or resource-limited team where you owned the codebase
Experience working in Latin America or the Caribbean
What We Offer
USD $1,500/month base salary plus housing in Roatán
Direct ownership of the engineering function for a critical company system
Real autonomy within a small team that ships fast
Relocation support for the right candidate
Life in Roatán: Caribbean island, bilingual community, low tax, growing innovation ecosystem inside the Próspera ZEDE
Location
Full-time, on-site in Próspera, Roatán. The team, the codebase, the customers, and the infrastructure you'll work on are all here. We will help qualified candidates with the move.
Referral Bonus: $750 for any candidate you refer who is hired and stays for at least four months.
Salary: 1,200 - 1,499 USD a month