Head of Technology

We're looking for a Head of Technology who can own the technical health and growth of our backend platform. You'll be part architect, part tech lead, part engineering manager. You won't just review code; you'll set the standard for how code is written, how systems are designed, and how the team thinks about quality, cost, and customer impact. This is not a senior IC role where you write code all day. And it's not a pure management role where you're in meetings all day. It's the balance between the two: the person who makes the team better while staying close enough to the code to make good decisions

The candidate will have responsibilities across the following functions:

System Reliability and Upkeep:

• Own the health of a production multi-tenant Node.js/TypeScript backend serving real-time messaging traffic.
• Lead incident response, root cause analysis, and post-mortem culture.
• Identify and drive reduction of technical debt proactively, not reactively.
• Ensure monitoring, alerting, and observability are in good shape (we use New Relic, Sentry, Pino structured logging).
• Work across multiple backend services and ensure they integrate reliably.

Scalable, Quality Engineering:

• Design and review system architecture decisions, schema changes, service boundaries, async workflows (we use Temporal.io), queue design.
• Drive engineering standards: code review culture, PR quality, test coverage, error handling patterns.
• Establish and enforce engineering practices that let the team ship fast without accumulating hidden risk.
• Evaluate build vs. buy decisions with a clear eye on long-term maintainability.

Cost Consciousness:

• Maintain a clear understanding of infrastructure costs (AWS, third-party APIs, LLM usage, DB compute).
• Actively flag cost anomalies and propose architectural or operational changes to address them.
• Balance engineering investment against business return; know when "good enough" is the right call.

Team Standards and Culture:

• Set a high bar for code quality not pedantry, but clarity, maintainability, and correctness.
• Build a review culture where feedback is constructive, specific, and educational.
• Help engineers grow by pair debugging, design reviews, and code walkthroughs.
• Define and document coding conventions, architecture patterns, and engineering principles that persist beyond any individual.