Staff Engineer & Engineering Lead

ABOUT DISTRO

Distro (distro.io) is a modern hiring and recruitment platform designed to provide staffing teams and employers with a faster, smarter way to source, evaluate, and place talent. Our platform supports enterprise and mid-market accounts in managing high-volume hiring workflows. We are a product-led, engineering-driven team building on PHP Laravel and React.

THE ROLE: Staff Engineer & Engineering Lead

We are seeking a Staff Engineer and Engineering Lead to drive the technical direction and daily organization of the Distro engineering team. This is primarily a leadership position, focusing on team structure, work planning and prioritization, engineer development, and technical decision-making. While the platform operates on AWS and is built with PHP Laravel and React, your core responsibility is to empower the engineering team to excel.

You will act as the crucial link between product leadership and the engineering team, translating roadmap priorities into organized, executable engineering tasks. This includes establishing standards, defining processes, and upholding technical quality across the organization. While hands-on contributions are valued, your primary role is that of a leader, mentor, and organizer.

The ideal candidate possesses strong convictions on effective engineering team operations, a proven track record of developing engineers, and the technical depth to command credibility in AWS infrastructure, system design, and integrations, even when not directly implementing solutions.

WHAT YOU WILL DO

Team Leadership & Organization

• Own the structure and organization of the engineering team, including how work is scoped, assigned, tracked, and delivered.
• Lead sprint planning, backlog grooming, and technical prioritization in partnership with product leadership.
• Establish and enforce engineering processes: code review standards, release practices, incident response, and documentation habits.
• Mentor and develop engineers at all levels through regular 1:1s, structured feedback, and deliberate growth planning.
• Identify gaps in team capability or process and drive concrete improvements.
• Serve as the primary technical point of contact for product, operations, and leadership stakeholders.
• Drive clarity on technical decisions, documenting tradeoffs, aligning the team, and ensuring follow-through.
• Drive AI adoption and usage across the team for efficiency and growth.

Technical Direction

• Own architectural decisions for AWS infrastructure, including ECS, CloudFormation, Aurora RDS, EC2, Lambda, and networking.
• Review and approve significant technical work, setting the standard for quality.
• Lead evaluation and integration of third-party services, including AI APIs (OpenAI) and platform services (RChilli, ATS integrations).
• Contribute hands-on when necessary, particularly in infrastructure, system design, and complex integration work, though this is not primarily a coding role.
• Identify and drive resolution of systemic performance, reliability, or scalability issues.

WHAT WE ARE LOOKING FOR

Leadership & Organization (Required)

• Demonstrated experience leading an engineering team, owning process, delivery, and people development.
• Track record of mentoring and growing engineers at different levels.
• Strong organizational instincts: ability to bring structure to ambiguous situations without creating bureaucracy.
• Experience working directly with product and business stakeholders to translate priorities into engineering plans.
• Excellent written and verbal communication in English; essential for a remote, async-heavy environment.
• Comfortable operating with significant autonomy and accountability.

Technical Depth (Required)

• 8+ years of engineering experience, with at least 2-3 years in a staff, principal, or technical lead capacity.
• Sufficient depth in PHP/Laravel and React to review work, guide decisions, and understand tradeoffs; hands-on production experience preferred.
• Experience designing, building, and maintaining REST APIs and third-party integrations.
• Working knowledge of SQL for query review, schema decisions, and performance analysis.
• Strong written communication skills in English; essential for a remote, async-heavy environment.
• Real-world usage of AI workflows in development, such as Cursor, Claude Code, Code Rabbit, etc.

AWS & Infrastructure (Primary Focus)

• Hands-on production experience with AWS ECS (container orchestration, task definitions, service configuration, capacity providers).
• Strong working knowledge of AWS CloudFormation for infrastructure as code, including writing and maintaining stacks and change sets.
• Experience with Aurora RDS, including cluster configuration, parameter groups, read replicas, and performance tuning.
• Proficiency with EC2, including instance sizing, AMIs, launch templates, auto-scaling groups, and placement strategies.
• Solid understanding of AWS networking: VPCs, subnets, security groups, NAT gateways, load balancers (ALB/NLB), and Route 53.
• Experience with AWS Lambda for event-driven and scheduled workloads.
• Familiarity with IAM, roles, and least-privilege access patterns across AWS services.

API & Third-Party Integrations

• Experience integrating with OpenAI APIs (completions, embeddings, or assistants) in a production environment.
• Familiarity with resume parsing services such as RChilli or similar document processing APIs.
• General experience connecting and maintaining integrations with external SaaS APIs in a production platform.

Nice to Have

• Experience in the HR tech, recruiting, or workforce management space.
• Familiarity with ATS systems, job board integrations (Indeed, LinkedIn, ZipRecruiter, etc.), or HRIS platforms.
• Experience with BI tooling such as Retool, Metabase, or similar.
• QA experience or familiarity with QA processes, including test strategy, automated testing frameworks, and quality gates; experience managing or working alongside a QA function is a plus.

HOW WE WORK

• Fully remote; you manage your own schedule and environment.
• Engineering culture that values code quality, pragmatism, and clear communication.
• Direct interface with product and engineering leadership in a flat, fast-moving team.
• Async-first communication with English as the working language.
• PJ engagement structure; you are responsible for your own tax and compliance obligations in Brazil.

We may use artificial intelligence (AI) tools to support parts of the hiring process, such as reviewing applications, analyzing resumes, or assessing responses. These tools assist our recruitment team but do not replace human judgment. Final hiring decisions are ultimately made by humans. If you would like more information about how your data is processed, please contact us.