Lead Engineer, Platform & Architecture

Description:

Who We Are:

We are Destify! We focus on our people, our culture, and our technology. We're reimagining the destination wedding experience, simplifying the complex, celebrating the meaningful, and building technology that connects thousands of couples to their dream celebrations.

What You Own:

Time percentages are planning guides, not stopwatch targets. Seasonal peaks flex; the shape of the year is what matters.

Architecture & Technical Direction — 25%

• Owns how the platform estate is built: patterns, technical approach, and the guardrails everything is measured against
• Builds proofs of concept that are production-ready — the approach is proven, not asserted.
• Owns that technical documentation and runbooks exist in team spaces, have a named owner per repository, and survive a departure
• Anticipates the impact of change across applications, data, integrations, and infrastructure, and guides the team through the trade-off

Platform & Foundations — 20%

• Technical standards and what "good" means in this codebase
• Developer operational velocity — the tooling, frameworks, and automation that make shipping safe and fast
• AI in the developer workflow: adopt, consolidate, retire. Maintains repository-level AI guidance (CLAUDE.md, conventions, test commands, review checklists). Build-versus-buy recommendations on platform tooling

Observability & Production Readiness — 20%

• Owns instrumentation and what gets measured — Honeycomb and the layer beneath
• Leads the non-functional requirements: security (secrets management, authentication, dependency hygiene), reliability, performance, maintainability, scalability
• Owns the cutover and deployment discipline on complex migrations, starting with the CRM decommission

Technical Mentorship & Code Review — 20%

• Owns the code review standard and holds it
• Technical mentorship for the Nepal team, async-first by design
• Raises the floor on backend services: every system has at least two engineers who can maintain and extend it

Feasibility for Product — 15%

• The single technical answer to "can we build this, what does it cost, what are the alternatives" for every product seat
• Answered in refinement, in writing, before commitment

Requirements:

What You Bring:

• A track record of outcomes you owned end to end. You have evidence of work that got better because you carried it, not just touched it.
• Reliability and follow-through: people can set a clock by your stated timelines and set deadlines.
• Curiosity when feedback lands, and the resilience to stay solution-focused when the day gets chaotic
• Architectural responsibility across six or more services at once, with examples you can walk through
• Depth in containers and orchestration (Docker, Kubernetes, Amazon EKS preferred). Kubernetes is currently a capability this team does not have
• AWS (Lambda, RDS) and infrastructure-as-code, preferably CDK or SAM
• Edge and DNS as a discipline: CDN, WAF, rate limiting, TLS and cache strategy, and the judgment to move a live domain without dropping traffic. Cloudflare preferred
• Strong TypeScript/JavaScript and C#; SQL and database design you can defend in review.
• Observability as a practice, not a tool purchase: you decide what gets instrumented and why (Honeycomb, PostHog)
• Comfortable in a mixed estate: modern services alongside a LAMP stack — PHP and WordPress on managed hosting — XML/SOAP supplier integrations, an in-house CRM being retired, and an identity layer at end-of-life.
• Uses Claude Code as an agentic coding partner: writes clear task prompts, reviews proposed changes, and validates results through tests, linting, and builds
• Has coached engineers and managed service partners across time zones
• Nice to have: Helm, Argo CD, HubSpot as a development platform (CRM APIs, UI extensions, webhooks)