Overview:
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.
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.
Qualifications:
- 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.
Preferred Experience:
- 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.
The National Society of Leadership and Success is an equal opportunity employer committed to diversity, equality, and inclusion
Visit nsls.org to learn more about our organization.