Engineering Lead

PlanHub

5d•Remote

About The Position

PlanHub is seeking an Engineering Lead to guide the technical direction, design, and continuous improvement of its email delivery systems. This role focuses on decoupling service boundaries, implementing event-driven architecture, and ensuring operational resilience. The lead will architect and implement cloud-native solutions using AWS services, including infrastructure as code with Terraform/OpenTofu and containerized workloads on ECS. A key aspect of this role is managing, supporting, and mentoring a team of engineers, fostering best practices in software architecture, cloud-native development, observability, and operational excellence. The lead will champion reliability, scalability, fault tolerance, and observability across the platform, leveraging tools like Datadog. Additionally, they will establish patterns for effectively using AI coding agents to enhance developer productivity and partner with leadership to translate business needs into scalable technical solutions and contribute to roadmap planning. Collaboration with application and infrastructure teams across the organization is crucial to elevate technical practices and improve overall engineering maturity.

Requirements

8+ years of experience in software engineering, backend systems, or platform development.
3+ years in a technical leadership role (Staff, Principal, Team Lead, or Architect) with experience managing and mentoring engineering teams.
Strong experience and deep understanding of software architecture, distributed systems, and integration patterns, with a proven ability to design, deliver, and operate observable, resilient, and scalable production systems.
Deep expertise in relational databases, specifically MySQL, including schema design, query optimization, and data modeling.
Experience leading teams working in PHP or similar dynamically-typed backend languages.
Extensive experience with AWS services for compute, storage, messaging, monitoring, and operational reliability.
Experience building and operating containerized applications using orchestration like ECS, and provisioning infrastructure using Terraform and/or OpenTofu.
Proven ability to lead technical decision-making while remaining hands-on with implementation.
Experience using AI coding tools (e.g. Claude Code, Cursor, GitHub Copilot) to improve software delivery, coupled with strong engineering judgment and quality controls.
Proficiency with modern development workflows and collaboration tools like GitHub and observability platforms such as Datadog.
Excellent communication, collaboration, and problem-solving skills in complex production environments.

Nice To Haves

Experience with high-volume transactional email systems, deliverability concepts, or messaging platforms
Experience modernizing legacy systems into more scalable and maintainable services
Experience shaping engineering standards or development practices around AI-assisted software delivery

Responsibilities

Lead the technical direction, design, and continuous improvement of PlanHub's email delivery systems, focusing on decoupling service boundaries, event driven architecture, and operational resilience.
Architect and implement cloud-native solutions using AWS services, including building and evolving infrastructure as code with Terraform / OpenTofu and containerized workloads deployed via ECS.
Manage, support, and mentor a team of engineers, promoting sound software architecture, cloud-native practices, observability, and operational excellence.
Champion reliability, scalability, fault tolerance, and observability across the platform, utilizing tools like Datadog for monitoring, alerting, and incident investigation.
Establish patterns for safely and effectively using AI coding agents, such as Claude Code, across design, implementation, debugging, and maintenance to improve developer productivity.
Partner with product and engineering leadership to translate business needs into scalable technical solutions and contribute to roadmap planning.
Partner with application and infrastructure teams across the engineering organization to elevate technical practices, drive architectural consistency, and improve overall engineering maturity.