About the role
The product architecture will evolve as the platform takes shape, and the Lead Product Engineer will play a critical role in defining its technical direction.
The core responsibilities for the job include the following:
End-to-End Product Development:
- Own the technical development of the platform from architecture and technology selection to production deployment.
- Design and develop backend services, APIs, frontend applications, databases, integrations, and infrastructure.
- Build the administrative and configuration layers required to manage multiple promotions and programs.
- Translate business requirements into scalable, maintainable product capabilities.
- Take ownership of technical decisions and production outcomes.
Build a Configurable, Reusable Platform:
- Design the platform around reusable modules rather than client-specific implementations.
- Identify common promotion patterns and convert them into configurable product capabilities.
- Build flexible campaign engines, rules, workflows, and integration frameworks.
- Ensure clear separation between core product logic and client-specific configurations.
- Follow the principle: Configure repeatedly. Build once. Customize only by exception.
AI-Native and Agentic Development:
- Make AI tools and coding agents an integral part of everyday engineering workflows.
- Use AI for requirement interpretation, solution design, code generation, API development, testing, debugging, and documentation.
- Build agentic workflows for automated code reviews, regression testing, security checks, refactoring, and release validation.
- Establish reusable prompts, engineering context, and AI-assisted development practices.
- Continuously improve engineering productivity, release frequency, and output per developer.
- Tools and technologies may include Cursor, Claude, OpenAI Codex, GitHub Copilot, AI coding, and browser agents.
- Workflow orchestration tools: Automated QA and testing tools, internally developed engineering agents.
- The expectation is to use AI beyond code autocomplete and integrate it meaningfully across the software development lifecycle.
Architecture and Technical Ownership:
- Define the overall architecture, technology stack, data models, and engineering standards.
- Build modular, API-first, scalable, and maintainable systems.
- Design event-driven workflows and distributed services wherever appropriate.
- Ensure support for multiple brands, campaigns, promotion formats, and integrations.
- Make pragmatic architecture decisions that balance scalability, simplicity, speed, and maintainability.
- Own technical trade-offs and ensure the platform remains manageable for a lean engineering team.
Rapid Product Development and Execution:
- Drive short development cycles, rapid prototyping, and continuous product iteration.
- Convert ideas and business requirements into working prototypes and production-ready capabilities.
- Enable the team to move from idea to prototype and production in weeks wherever practical.
- Use AI-assisted development to accelerate implementation without compromising engineering quality.
- Establish a culture of experimentation, ownership, and fast execution.
Technical Team Leadership:
- Lead and mentor a small engineering team of approximately 5-6 engineers.
- Participate in hiring, technical mentoring, sprint planning, and prioritization.
- Establish engineering practices, coding standards, and quality benchmarks.
- Drive architecture discussions, code reviews, and technical decision-making.
- Improve team productivity through effective adoption of AI tools and agentic workflows.
- Remain actively involved in coding, prototyping, debugging, and reviewing critical components.
Production Engineering and Quality:
- Establish automated testing, CI/CD pipelines, and release management practices.
- Ensure production readiness, application security, performance, and reliability.
- Implement monitoring, logging, observability, and incident-management workflows.
- Establish deployment, rollback, backup, and recovery mechanisms.
- Introduce AI-assisted testing, code validation, debugging, and incident analysis.
- Ensure AI-generated code meets the same quality and security standards as manually developed code.
Requirements:
- 8-15 years of experience in software engineering, product development, or full-stack engineering.
- Proven experience building and launching products or platforms from scratch.
- Strong hands-on full-stack engineering and system architecture capabilities.
- Strong backend development experience with modern programming languages and frameworks.
- Experience designing REST APIs, database architectures, integrations, and scalable services.
- Strong understanding of relational and NoSQL databases, caching, and asynchronous/event-driven systems.
- Experience with cloud infrastructure, application deployment, Docker, and CI/CD pipelines.
- Experience building modular, reusable, and configurable software platforms.
- Hands-on experience using AI coding tools such as Cursor, Claude, Codex, GitHub Copilot, or similar.
- Practical experience integrating LLMs, AI agents, or AI-powered workflows into software development or products.
- Experience with automated testing, code quality, monitoring, and production operations.
- Experience leading or mentoring small engineering teams while remaining technically hands-on.
- Strong product mindset with the ability to translate business requirements into practical technology solutions.