Lead Engineer

About Runable

Runable builds software that helps small and medium businesses grow — the tooling, automation, and workflows that let a lean team operate like a much larger one. We ship fast, own our work end to end, and measure success by what our customers actually get done.

The Role

We are hiring an Engineering Lead who is a backend-heavy full stack builder. You will own services end to end: data model, API, business logic, background jobs, and the React screens that sit on top of them. Roughly 70% of your time is backend and systems work, 30% frontend.

This is a builder role, not a ticket-taking role. You will be given a problem and the context around it, and you are expected to come back with a design, ship it, and stand behind it in production.

What You'll Do

• Design, build, and operate backend services and REST/JSON APIs that power customer-facing products.
• Own data modeling and database work in PostgreSQL — schema design, migrations, indexing, and query optimization.
• Build asynchronous and event-driven flows: background jobs, queues, retries, idempotency, and scheduled work.
• Integrate third-party systems (payments, email, CRM, messaging, LLM providers) with sane error handling and rate-limit behavior.
• Build the frontend for the features you own in React and TypeScript — clean, fast, accessible screens, not throwaway UI.
• Instrument what you ship: logging, metrics, alerts, and dashboards, so failures are visible before customers report them.
• Improve reliability and performance — find the slow query, the N+1, the memory leak, the cache that should exist, and fix it.
• Review peers code, write the design docs that matter, and keep the codebase something the next engineer can work in.
• Participate in on-call rotation for the services you own, and drive incident follow-ups to closure.

Requirements

• 5–9 years of professional software engineering experience, with the majority of it on backend systems.
• Strong command of at least one backend language used in production at scale — TypeScript/Node.js preferred; strong Python, Go, or Java experience with willingness to work primarily in TypeScript is welcome.
• Deep, practical PostgreSQL (or comparable relational database) experience: you can explain a query plan, design a schema for a real product, and migrate it safely with live traffic.
• Proven experience designing and shipping APIs consumed by real clients — versioning, pagination, auth, error contracts.
• Working knowledge of React and modern frontend fundamentals: component structure, state management, forms, and API integration.
• Comfortable with cloud infrastructure (AWS, GCP, or similar), containers, CI/CD, and deploying your own code.
• Solid grasp of caching, queues, and background processing (Redis, SQS/Kafka/BullMQ or equivalents).
• Testing discipline — unit and integration tests, and a clear view of what is worth testing.
• Strong debugging skills in production environments and the judgment to know when to patch versus when to fix properly.
• Clear written and verbal communication; you can explain a tradeoff to a non-engineer.

Nice to Have

• Experience at a startup or on a small team where you owned a service end to end.
• Multi-tenant SaaS experience — tenancy models, per-tenant limits, billing, and usage metering.
• Experience building with LLM APIs, agents, or workflow automation in production.
• Payments and subscription billing (Stripe or similar).
• Infrastructure-as-code (Terraform, Pulumi) and observability tooling (OpenTelemetry, Grafana, Sentry, Datadog).
• Experience mentoring engineers or leading a small project team.

What Success Looks Like

Timeframe

Expected outcome

First 30 days

Environment set up, first features shipped to production, familiar with the core data model and services.

First 60 days

Owning a service or product area end to end, contributing to design reviews, closing reliability gaps you found yourself.

First 90 days

Leading delivery of a significant backend project, measurably improving performance or reliability of the area you own, and raising the bar in code review.

Our Stack

TypeScript across the stack, Node.js/Bun services, PostgreSQL, Redis, React, REST APIs, Docker, and cloud-hosted infrastructure with CI/CD. We are pragmatic about tools — the right choice is the one the team can operate at 3am.

Why Runable

• Real ownership: you pick the design, ship it, and see the customer impact within weeks.
• Small team, high leverage — your work reaches SMB customers who feel the difference immediately.
• Direct access to founders and customers; short feedback loops, minimal process.
• Compensation is benchmarked to experience and impact, and discussed openly in the first conversation.