Member of the Technical Staff - Next.js
Hands-on engineering team lead building and evolving Next.js while coaching a small team and setting technical direction. Requires 8+ years of software engineering experience, strong React or framework architecture expertise, and continued production coding experience.
About the job
Responsibilities
- Write production code, review pull requests, debug complex issues, and contribute directly to the Next.js framework and supporting systems.
- Lead technical initiatives from exploration through architecture, implementation, rollout, and production follow-through.
- Set architectural direction across rendering, caching, routing, build systems, runtime behavior, and developer tooling.
- Investigate performance regressions, production failures, and developer pain points, turning findings into framework improvements.
- Establish strong practices for code quality, testing, performance, reliability, observability, and incremental delivery.
- Coach engineers through pairing, design reviews, code reviews, technical feedback, and shared ownership.
- Provide focused people leadership, including expectations, feedback, career development, and team accountability.
- Improve planning and decision-making practices and clarify ownership.
- Partner with Product, Design, Infrastructure, Developer Experience, and other engineering teams.
- Engage with open-source contributors and balance community, product, and technical priorities.
- Participate in recruiting and help onboard engineers to a complex codebase.
Requirements
- 8+ years of software engineering experience.
- Experience leading engineers or small technical teams as a team lead, tech lead, staff engineer, engineering manager, or founder.
- Recent experience writing, reviewing, and shipping production code.
- Strong technical judgment across React, framework architecture, or systems behind large-scale open-source projects.
- Experience with rendering, caching, routing, build tooling, and runtime behavior.
- Ability to solve complex technical problems, implement critical code, and guide other engineers.
- Experience building products or infrastructure for developers.
- Systems thinking and the ability to guide scalable technical decisions.
- Clear written communication and productive technical debate.
- Experience using AI tools in an engineering workflow and informed opinions on agentic developer products.
Nice-to-haves
- Experience maintaining or contributing to a major open-source project, especially in the React or Next.js ecosystem.
- Experience with compilers, bundlers, caching, rendering systems, or distributed infrastructure.
- Experience leading a small, senior engineering team while making substantial individual contributions.
- Experience forming a team or technical direction from zero to one.
- Familiarity with the Next.js codebase.
Compensation and Benefits
- San Francisco base pay range: $230,000–$340,000.
- Equity and potential company bonus or variable pay program.
- Inclusive healthcare package.
- Learning and growth support, including mentorship and events.
- Flexible time off.
- Equipment and work-from-home budget.
Skills
Next.js, React, JavaScript, Rendering, Caching, Routing, Build Systems, Developer Tooling, TypeScript, Compilers, Bundlers, Distributed Systems, Open Source
Similar jobs
Engineering Management jobs
Skydio
San Mateo, CA
Leads and develops a software engineering team building middleware and on-device services for autonomous drone platforms. The role combines people management with hands-on Python or C++ development, systems architecture, reliability improvements, and cross-functional technical leadership.
Crusoe
Bellevue, WALeads the deployment organization responsible for bringing global HPC and GPU infrastructure online, owning people, delivery, standards, vendors, and executive-level program risk. Requires 10+ years in network engineering or data center deployment and substantial engineering management experience.
Genius AI
San Francisco, CA
Leads Compute, Data, and Developer Experience teams, owning infrastructure strategy, reliability, developer enablement, vendor spend, and team growth. The role requires 8+ years of infrastructure or platform experience, 4+ years of engineering leadership, and deep expertise in AWS, Kubernetes, Terraform, ArgoCD, and observability.
Shield AI
Dallas, TX
Leads the Guidance and Control team responsible for developing, integrating, qualifying, and flight-testing autonomy and control algorithms for unmanned aerial systems. Requires substantial engineering leadership experience, controls expertise, and a track record of shipping products and developing high-performing teams.
Vercel
San Francisco, CAHands-on technical leader for the Next.js team, combining framework engineering with focused people leadership. The role requires 8+ years of software engineering experience, strong React and systems judgment, and experience leading engineers while remaining close to production code.