Lead Product Engineer

The National Society of Leadership and Success (NSLS)

69d

About The Position

The Lead Product Engineer will join a team of 100+ purpose-driven staff members in a friendly, focused, fast-paced entrepreneurial environment. The National Society of Leadership and Success (NSLS) is the largest accredited leadership honor society in the United States, with over 800 chapters and more than 2 million members. The Lead Product Engineer will serve as the technical steward for the Ignite platform, shaping the architecture, guiding engineering execution, and ensuring the team delivers high-quality features with speed and confidence. This senior technical leader will work closely with the Head of Product, serve as a force multiplier for engineering productivity, and own the technical strategy that powers the next stage of Ignite’s evolution. This is both a leadership and hands-on role: you will architect systems, coach engineers, improve tooling, and define processes that enable the team to operate at a high velocity while maintaining stability and scalability.

Requirements

7+ years of engineering experience, including ownership of complex system architecture.
Proven experience as a tech lead, team lead, or engineering manager responsible for both delivery and people.
Deep expertise with React/Next.js, TypeScript, Node, APIs, and cloud-native architectural patterns.
Strong system-design skills: modularization, data modeling, service boundaries, and performance optimization.
Experience building or improving CI/CD pipelines, testing strategies, and developer tooling.
Ability to simplify complexity and drive clarity in ambiguous or fast-moving environments.

Nice To Haves

Prior ownership of an engineering team’s velocity, code quality, and operational excellence.
Experience integrating analytics instrumentation (PostHog or similar) into event-driven architecture.
Strong background with communication tools (Braze, Twilio, Customer.io) and their technical integration points.
Experience embedding AI systems, personalization logic, or recommendation engines into a user-facing product.

Responsibilities

Architecture Ownership
Define and own the end-to-end architecture for the Ignite application, ensuring cohesion across features, services, and user experiences.
Establish architectural principles and guardrails that support experimentation while maintaining long-term maintainability.
Evaluate and select frameworks, patterns, and tooling with a strategic lens—balancing speed, cost, scalability, and talent availability.
Engineering Leadership & Management
Lead, mentor, and grow the engineering team; provide technical direction, unblock developers, and ensure engineering excellence.
Stay current with AI development and ensure the team uses best practices.
Conduct code reviews, pair-programming sessions, and technical deep dives to elevate quality and consistency across the team.
Work closely with contractors and full-time engineers to align on standards, deliverables, and sprint goals.
Translate product requirements into clear technical plans with risks, assumptions, and sequencing.
Developer Experience & Velocity
Own and continuously improve the developer experience: tooling, CI/CD, environments, local setup, testing strategy, and automation.
Reduce friction in the development process through better libraries, documentation, templates, scaffolding, and reusable components.
Increase engineering throughput by identifying bottlenecks and eliminating unnecessary complexity.
Implement and maintain system observability—logs, metrics, alerting—for fast diagnosis and reliable operations.
Feature Delivery & Product Partnership
Collaborate with product, design, and marketing to turn ambiguous concepts into clear technical solutions.
Lead technical discovery for new features, identify dependencies, and propose simplified solutions where appropriate.
Ensure that system performance, reliability, and scalability underpin all new product work.
Bring a strong experimentation mindset that enables the team to ship, test, measure, and iterate quickly.
AI & Advanced System Integration
Partner with AI engineers to design and integrate LLM-powered features (chat, personalization, agents, internal automations).
Ensure architectural readiness for AI-driven workflows, data pipelines, and real-time interactions.
Cross-Functional Influence
Represent engineering in strategic discussions, shaping roadmaps and making trade-offs visible to stakeholders.
Communicate clearly upward and across teams—technical decisions, risks, timelines, and opportunities.