Full stack engineering is three jobs with one title.

Full Stack Engineers Need Raises

Full stack engineers do everything. They are jacks of all trades.

I built a recruiting system for QBA from the ground up, and it was a lot of work, even with the help of AI. When you work in a specialized field like frontend development, production engineering, or data engineering, you focus on one specific role. You need deep knowledge, but you also tend to repeat many of the same tasks to optimize one part of the product.

Full stack is different.

Building an Automated Recruiting System

Building an automated recruiting system from scratch meant handling:

All while thinking about code modularity and system architecture.

It genuinely took me a long time just to get the project started. I had weeks where I told my manager I didn't have anything visual to show because I was building the backend-setting up CRUD for users and recruiter roles and designing the data architecture.

Then the frontend started to come together. It worked, but it lacked aesthetics. That alone taught me why frontend engineers have their own niche. It takes real effort to make something not just functional, but clean and intuitive.

The ML Layer

After building a visually coherent website where recruiters could log in, view job applications, and assess candidates, I still had to build the ML side. I used machine learning techniques to evaluate which candidates were best suited for specific roles.

To do that, I created a dataset using LLM-generated job descriptions, fake candidates, and fake resumes, then trained a model using BERT and similarity search. I also pulled from Kaggle and other data sources to improve variety and accuracy.

It worked-not as well as I wanted, but it worked. Time and data accessibility were two major reasons the validation accuracy was lower than I hoped.

The Takeaway

It was a great experience, but it also taught me something: being a full stack engineer means understanding far more than one lane. You are constantly switching contexts, solving different kinds of problems, and building across layers that are often treated like separate careers.

That's why full stack engineers need raises.