RESPONSIBILITIES:

• Set technical direction for Member Growth's systems. Own the architecture and its evolution across pods, not just your own.
• Find the highest-leverage problems and opportunities in the funnel, the platform, and our ways of working, and put them on the roadmap with a proposal.
• Write the proposals. Tech designs and RFCs with architecture diagrams, options, tradeoffs, and a clear recommendation. Make hard decisions easy to understand and easy to make.
• Make system-level calls on when to introduce eventing (Kafka, SQS), workflow orchestration (Temporal, Airflow, DAGs), caching, async pipelines, or new services, and when not to.
• Design for horizontal scale and low, uniform latency under real Thrive traffic patterns.
• Decompose existing services into scalable components where it materially helps. Plan the migration path, not just the end state.
• Work cross-team and cross-function. Partner with Frontend Core, Backend Core, Data, and other product teams to align on shared systems, boundaries, and contracts. Represent Member Growth in technical decisions that affect us.
• Take a fuzzy, multi-team problem, break it into a plan with clear owners, and see it through. Unblock others.
• Build consensus with engineers, Product, and leadership. Disagree clearly. Commit fully.
• Tie engineering decisions to outcomes. Instrument what you build. Defend what you ship with data.
• Test-driven from the start. Quality, reliability, and observability are first-class, not afterthoughts.
• Bring Product and Design options and a recommendation, not a single path.
• Define what good looks like in design, code, and operations. Mentor, review, challenge, elevate. Grow the next seniors and staff.
• Own the SLAs for the surfaces Member Growth runs and the standards that keep them healthy.
• Multiply output with AI tooling, for yourself and the team.

QUALIFICATIONS

• 8+ years building and operating high-traffic, customer-facing systems, including technical leadership across multiple teams
• Strong CS fundamentals: object-oriented design, relational database design, and systems reasoning
• Fluency at the system and cloud level: eventing (Kafka, SNS, SQS), workflow orchestration (Temporal, Airflow, DAGs), distributed systems tradeoffs, caching, async pipelines, idempotency, backpressure
• Comfortable moving between layers and stacks; language is a tool, not an identity. Our stack today is PHP/Magento on the backend and React/Next on the frontend, on AWS.
• Working knowledge of AWS (Lambda, S3, CloudWatch, SQS, etc.) and clear reasoning about tradeoffs between relational, document, and wide-column stores
• A track record of shipping high-impact, customer-facing features in production at scale
• A track record of setting technical direction: proposals written, architectures adopted, migrations landed, standards others follow
• Strong written and visual communicator; diagrams, design docs, and proposals are how you think out loud
• Influence without authority: has aligned engineers, Product, and leadership across teams on a direction and delivered it
• Has measurably leveled up the engineers around them
• Concise, high-altitude communicator who defaults to options plus recommendation, not exhaustive detail
• Member-first orientation: Customer, Team, and Business, in that order
• Observability and monitoring experience (New Relic, Datadog, or similar) to maintain SLA, Apdex, and error rate
• Growth, e-commerce, subscription, or membership experience is a plus: funnels, experimentation, attribution and pixels, payments and recurring billing.