Lead technical direction for Internal Tools, designing and building end-to-end front-end and back-end systems. Implement recommendation, ranking, and search capabilities, reduce technical debt with refactors, establish engineering standards, mentor engineers, and ensure secure admin interfaces and reusable tooling.
You're the technical leader for Internal Tools, owning architecture, quality, and engineering standards for the tools our internal teams rely on every day. This isn't a maintenance role. You'll bring recommendation, ranking, and other data-driven techniques to bear on how our tools work, and push for smarter automation wherever it saves people time.
We're looking for someone adept in AI-collaborative development who can define the right problems and balance human and technology intelligence to solve them thoughtfully. You'll work directly with the Engineering Manager, who brings product requirements and technical vision; you turn them into specs, system designs, and implementation plans. You're the team's top technical voice while also being a high-output IC. Expect roughly a 80/20 split between hands-on coding and technical leadership.
Responsibilities
- Own technical direction for Internal Tools, including front-end architecture and component/design system strategy, and turn product requirements into technical designs and engineering tickets
- Design and build new internal tools and admin features end-to-end, front-end through back-end
- Find opportunities to apply recommendation, ranking, and search techniques to our tools, partnering with data science and product to set priorities
- Drive down technical debt through targeted refactors and set engineering standards through design reviews
- Build reusable components and tooling that pay off beyond a single project
- Be the escalation point for deep debugging, and partner with security to keep admin interfaces locked down
- Help engineers grow through pairing, code review, and direct feedback; write the specs and docs that let the team build with confidence
Qualifications
- 5+ years building software, with a track record of shipping systems that scale
- Strong system design and architecture skills
- Extensive experience in JavaScript/TypeScript and Node.js
- Advanced, production-grade React skills
- Hands-on with PostgreSQL, MongoDB, or Elasticsearch, including performance tuning
- Experience building and scaling backend systems, ideally at a startup or small company
- Track record of mentoring engineers
What Sets You Apart
- Production experience with Next.js
- Experience with recommendation, ranking, or search systems
- Product-minded: you think about users, not just systems
- Background building internal tools or ops platforms
- Comfortable with cloud infrastructure, Docker/Kubernetes, and CI/CD
- Familiar with prompt engineering, fine-tuning, or shipping ML in production
Raya Los Angeles, California, USA Office
Raya is centrally located in Los Angeles. Our office is nestled among some of LA's best known sites, including LACMA and the Grove.
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