Full Stack Manager / Lead

About the Role

We are looking for an Engineering Manager (or a senior Tech Lead ready to step into management) to lead our full stack engineering group building on the MERN stack (MongoDB, Express, React, Node.js). This is a player-coach role: you will manage the frontend and backend teams end-to-end while staying technically credible enough to review architecture, unblock hard problems, and set the standards the team ships against.

You will own delivery across cloud and on-premise deployment models — our products serve enterprise clients whose data residency, security, and compliance requirements mean "cloud-only" is not an option. You will be accountable for what your teams build, how well it runs in production, and the engineering discipline that makes both predictable.

This is not a pure people-management role and not a pure architect role. The right candidate has earned genuine depth in full stack JavaScript engineering and is ready to multiply that depth through a team.

What You'll Own

1. Team Leadership: Frontend and Backend

Manage 10–15 engineers organized into frontend and backend squads. Own hiring, onboarding, one-on-ones, performance reviews, and growth plans. Build the bench — identify and develop senior engineers into tech leads. Balance capacity across squads as roadmap priorities shift, and keep both sides of the stack moving in lockstep rather than as separate silos.

2. API Development and Backend Architecture

Own the design and quality of our API layer — REST (and GraphQL where it earns its place), built on Node.js/Express. This includes:

• API design standards: versioning, contracts, error handling, pagination, idempotency
• Authentication and authorization patterns (OAuth2/OIDC, JWT, RBAC)
• Data modeling and query performance on MongoDB, including schema design, indexing strategy, and aggregation pipeline optimization
• Service decomposition decisions — when to split, when to keep the monolith honest
• API documentation, mocking, and contract testing so frontend and integration teams are never blocked

3. Frontend Engineering Direction

Set the technical bar for the React codebase:

• Component architecture, state management patterns, and design-system adoption
• Performance budgets — bundle size, rendering performance, Core Web Vitals
• Accessibility and cross-browser standards
• Frontend testing strategy (unit, component, end-to-end) that catches regressions before clients do

4. Cloud and On-Premise Deployments

Own the deployment story across both models:

• Cloud: containerized deployments, environment management, cost-aware infrastructure choices, managed vs. self-hosted trade-offs
• On-premise: installable, upgradable releases for enterprise client environments — packaging, versioning, configuration management, and support for air-gapped or restricted-network setups
• A single codebase and release process that serves both — config-over-fork, feature flags, and disciplined environment parity
• Partnering with DevOps/SRE on CI/CD pipelines, infrastructure-as-code, observability, and rollback strategies

5. Engineering Standards and Enforcement

Define — and actually enforce — the standards the team works to:

• Code review discipline, branching strategy, and definition-of-done
• Coding standards and linting for both JavaScript/TypeScript codebases
• Security practices: dependency hygiene, secrets management, OWASP-aware development
• Test coverage expectations and quality gates in CI
• Technical debt tracking and a deliberate paydown cadence, negotiated with product rather than bolted on

Standards that exist only in a wiki don't count. You will be measured on whether the codebase and the delivery metrics reflect them.

6. Delivery and Production Ownership

Own sprint execution, release planning, and delivery commitments for your teams. Communicate progress, risk, and trade-offs to product and delivery leadership early — no surprise slippage. Own production health: incident response, root-cause reviews, SLA adherence, and the unglamorous operational debt that keeps systems reliable.

7. Stakeholder Collaboration

Work with product management on roadmap sequencing and technical enablers. Represent your teams in cross-team forums — architecture reviews, security discussions, platform decisions. Join client-facing technical conversations where enterprise customers need confidence in the engineering behind the product, particularly around on-premise deployment and security posture.

What You'll Need

Must-Haves

• 8–12+ years in software engineering, with 2–4+ years leading teams as a Tech Lead or Engineering Manager
• Demonstrated experience managing or leading 8+ engineers, ideally across both frontend and backend disciplines
• Deep, hands-on MERN stack expertise:
  • Node.js/Express services in production at meaningful scale
  • React application architecture beyond CRUD — state management, performance, component design
  • MongoDB in production: schema design, indexing, replication/sharding awareness, aggregation
  • TypeScript across the stack
• Strong track record in API design and development — you have opinions on versioning, contracts, and error semantics, and can defend them
• Experience shipping to both cloud and on-premise environments, including the packaging, upgrade, and configuration discipline on-prem demands
• Working fluency with containerization and CI/CD (Docker, Kubernetes or equivalent orchestration, pipeline design)
• Experience defining and enforcing engineering standards across a team — with evidence that quality metrics improved as a result
• Comfort operating under enterprise or regulated-industry constraints: security reviews, audit trails, client-mandated deployment restrictions
• Ability to switch between reviewing a pull request and presenting a delivery plan to leadership without losing credibility in either room