As the Lead Software Engineer for the Writing product, you will shape the technical foundation of a dynamic web application built on a modern stack. This role blends deep technical ownership with leadership, requiring strong judgment in balancing innovation, stability, and long-term maintainability—without direct reports, your influence will come through code, collaboration, and clear decision-making.
Key Responsibilities
- Lead architectural planning for the writing application, evaluating trade-offs across performance, scalability, and development velocity.
- Establish and refine coding standards, testing practices, and dependency strategies to ensure consistent, high-quality deliverables.
- Respond to production incidents as the primary technical point of contact, leading diagnosis, resolution, and post-mortem analysis to prevent recurrence.
- Guide engineering discussions during planning, standups, and retrospectives, ensuring technical decisions are documented and aligned with product goals.
- Conduct in-depth pull request reviews, identifying architectural risks, enforcing modularity, and ensuring changes are scoped effectively.
- Unblock development progress by resolving technical hurdles, making timely decisions, and escalating blockers when necessary.
- Bridge product vision and technical execution, clearly communicating implementation status, constraints, and risks to stakeholders and engineering leadership.
- Integrate AI-assisted development tools like Claude Code and Copilot into workflows while maintaining rigorous code review standards for security and quality.
Qualifications
You bring at least five years of experience building and maintaining full-stack web applications in a SaaS environment. You’re proficient in React and Next.js for frontend development, and experienced in Python for backend systems. You understand API design, database modeling, and state management at scale.
You’re familiar with CI/CD pipelines, deployment strategies, and monitoring tools such as Datadog. You’ve used AI coding assistants responsibly, with awareness of licensing and security implications. You thrive with autonomy—initiating work, driving it forward, and anticipating next steps without oversight.
Your code reviews are thorough and constructive, reflecting a commitment to elevating team standards. You’ve made technical decisions in uncertain conditions and can clearly explain the rationale behind them. You communicate effectively in both synchronous meetings and asynchronous channels like Slack and documentation.
Preferred Experience
- Background in rich text editing, collaborative document systems, or frameworks like ProseMirror is highly advantageous.
Technology Environment
The stack includes Next.js, Node.js, Python, React, Datadog, and AI-powered development tools such as Claude Code, Copilot, and Cursor. Experience with ProseMirror or similar libraries is beneficial.
