Engineering Manager / Tech Lead — Distro

Distro • Stratton, VT

1d • $4,000 - $5,000 • Remote

About The Position

Distro is an AI-powered recruiting platform that connects to customers' existing ATS, syncs jobs and candidates, and runs an automated multi-stage pipeline using LLMs for parsing, scoring, and interviewing applicants. AI is central to the product's functionality. The company is seeking an individual to lead the engineering efforts, taking ownership of the architecture, AWS environment, and team growth. This is a hands-on, full-stack role where the individual will be actively involved in writing code across the entire stack.

Requirements

• 5+ years of experience building and running production systems as a full-stack engineer, with genuine comfort in both Laravel and React.
• Strong PHP/Laravel experience, or equivalent experience in another modern backend framework with a willingness to work in Laravel.
• Hands-on AWS ownership experience, including ECS, Aurora/RDS, monitoring, incident response, and cost optimization.
• Experience with asynchronous job processing, including queues, workers, retries, idempotency, and dead-letter handling.
• Production experience with the OpenAI API (completions, structured outputs, vector stores), including handling non-deterministic output and managing token costs at scale.
• Fluency with AI-assisted development tools like Claude Code, including using them for planning, review, and repo-level context.
• Experience leading or mentoring engineers, formally or informally.
• Professional working English.

Nice To Haves

• SOC 2 or similar compliance experience.
• Experience in ATS, HR tech, or recruiting domain.
• Infrastructure as code experience (CloudFormation, Terraform, CDK).
• Experience building or integrating MCP servers or agentic workflows.

Responsibilities

• Own the AI processing pipeline, ensuring it is correct, observable, and cost-efficient. This involves managing a chained, asynchronous, multi-stage system with queued jobs and non-deterministic model calls.
• Perform full-stack feature work across both the backend (Laravel) and frontend (React).
• Manage AWS infrastructure end-to-end, including ECS, Aurora, S3, and supporting services, with accountability for cost control.
• Maintain SOC 2 Type 2 compliance, which includes evidence collection, control remediation, access reviews, and backup restoration testing.
• Lead a small team of engineers, providing code review, technical direction, unblocking, and growth conversations.
• Contribute to product input, participating in discussions about what the company builds.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Mid Level
• Education Level: No Education Listed