Tech Lead - Product Engineering

Job description

## About Stensul Stensul is the Governed Creation™ Platform for enterprise marketing teams that need to create campaigns quickly, safely, and at scale. We bring creation, collaboration, and control together in one connected platform, combining AI-enabled creation, no-code production, embedded governance, and seamless integrations across the marketing tech stack. The result: faster output, lower costs, reduced risk, and work that stays consistently on brand. At Stensul, we’re just as intentional about how we work as about what we build. We’re a people-first team that values inclusive collaboration, ownership, and continuous learning. If you thrive in a fast-paced environment and want to help define the future of marketing creation, we’d love to meet you. ## Why This Role Matters We're looking for a Technical Lead to own the technical direction of our email builder team: where enterprise marketers assemble campaign emails and check them against brand, legal, and rendering standards before the email ever goes out for review. Get it right here and the review cycle is short. Get it wrong and the whole campaign stalls in rework. It is Stensul's original product surface and its most heavily used, so anything that breaks here is felt by customers immediately. You would join a long-lived, cross-functional team where Engineering, Product, and Design work together on the same domain, owning it from idea through production and into long-term maintenance. Nobody hands the team a spec and nobody hands the team's output to someone else to run. You would own technical direction as an individual contributor, partnering with the Engineering Manager who owns people, capacity, and delivery. You'll navigate the tension between technical sustainability and business urgency, making architectural decisions that compound over time in a B2B platform serving large, heavily regulated, demanding organizations. If you care as much about how a team works as about what it builds, and you'd rather model good practices than mandate them, this is the kind of role where you'll thrive. ## What makes this problem interesting Email is one of the last genuinely hostile target environments in software. There is no single rendering standard, the clients that matter most disagree with each other, and the people producing the output are marketers, not engineers. Our job is to let someone with no technical background assemble something complex and have it come out correct every time, in every inbox. Then add the harder constraint: many of our customers are large financial institutions. For them, "on brand" is not a preference and "approved" is not a formality. A campaign that goes out with the wrong disclosure is a regulatory problem, not a design problem. So the guardrails cannot be a review step at the end. They have to be built into the creation experience itself, tight enough to guarantee compliance and flexible enough so people can still do their work. That is the tension you would spend your time on, and it is getting sharper. As AI and agents start producing more of this content, the constraint system has to hold for output no human wrote. ## What You'll Do ### Technical Leadership - Lead architectural and technical discussions within the team, facilitating clear decision-making and documenting tradeoffs and risks. - Guide the technical direction of the team while ensuring alignment with Stensul’s broader engineering architecture. - Promote engineering best practices including shift-left on security, data privacy, observability, and system reliability. - Partner with other functional areas in Engineering for ensuring alignment and shared goals ### Hands-on Engineering - Contribute directly to the codebase and lead by example through high-quality engineering practices. - Improve system architecture, scalability, performance, and maintainability. - Drive complex technical initiatives and refactoring efforts. ### Team Development - Mentor and support engineers in their technical growth. - Foster a culture of **continuous learning, collaboration, and technical excellence**. - Encourage ownership across the team—from idea to production and long-term maintenance. - Provide technical input and perspective to hiring and team growth decisions, partnering with the Engineering Manager who owns staffing and capacity planning ### Cross-Team Collaboration - Work closely with other Tech Leads, platform teams, and SRE to align on architecture and engineering standards. - Coordinate cross-team initiatives and high-impact deployments. - Contribute to improving engineering processes and practices across the organization. ### Operational Excellence - Own system availability and reliability, taking accountability when critical situations arise and leading the team through them. - Treat quality as the team's responsibility, not a downstream function's. You will partner closely with QA Engineering on test strategy, automation, and prevention, and you will be expected to raise the team's own bar rather than rely on someone else catching things later. - Lead and participate in incident reviews, post-mortems, and continuous improvement efforts. - Proactively identify and communicate risks, blockers, and technical challenges. ## Technical Challenges You'll Help Solve Some of the problems you’ll work on include: - Scaling a platform that enables marketing teams and agents to produce complex campaigns quickly and reliably. - Designing scalable APIs and integrations with major marketing enterprise platforms. - Improving system performance and reliability across distributed services. - Evolving architecture to support growing product capabilities and enterprise customer demands. - Simplifying complex workflows so non-technical users can build sophisticated marketing assets. ## Our Core Tech Stack - **Frontend:** Vue.js, TypeScript - **Backend:** PHP/Laravel, Node.js, Python - **Infrastructure:** Docker, Kubernetes, GCP - **Databases:** MySQL/MariaDB, MongoDB - **Observability:** Datadog, New Relic, Sentry, Kibana - **CI/CD & Version Control:** Git-based workflows ## What We’re Looking For ### Experience - 10+ years of experience building and shipping high-quality software. - 5+ years of technical leadership within engineering teams. - Strong experience designing scalable web applications and APIs. - Solid understanding of software architecture, data modeling, and design patterns. - Experience working in modern web development environments. - Experience leading large refactoring initiatives in complex systems. ### Technical Skills - Strong JavaScript expertise and experience with frameworks. Vue.js preferred, React or other mainstream frameworks considered. - Experience with server-side languages such as **PHP, Node.js, Golang, or Python**. - Strong knowledge of **web architecture, APIs, and distributed systems**. - Experience with relational and document databases (MySQL, MongoDB). - Strong testing and quality practices including unit, integration, and end-to-end testing, and frameworks. - Strong refactoring skills and commitment to code quality. - Experience with monitoring and observability tools. - Proficiency with AI-assisted software development workflows. - Currently and actively working hands-on with AI agents as part of your day-to-day engineering practice. - Experience with containerization technologies such as **Docker or Kubernetes**. - Experience with version control systems (Git). ### Leadership & Collaboration - Strong communication skills across both technical and non-technical stakeholders. - Ability to balance technical excellence with pragmatic delivery. - Experience mentoring engineers and helping teams grow. - Comfortable leading technical discussions and influencing architectural decisions. - A track record of building genuine partnerships with QA, Security, SRE, etc. We are looking for someone who has made a team's software processes and production better in all aspects from inside the team, not someone who has managed handoffs. - Comfortable working in a flexible and dynamic business environment. - Commitment to raise the bar of the overall engineering team, identifying and pushing for local optimizations into broader impact initiatives - Positive energy that creates a healthy environment and inspires team members to be better engineers ## Nice to Have - Experience building high-performance or high-availability applications. - Experience with PHP frameworks such as **Laravel, Symfony, or Zend**. - Experience with functional programming concepts. ## What We Offer - Competitive compensation package including **equity** - Company laptop - Flexible time off policy - The opportunity to **lead technical decision-making and shape the platform’s architecture** - A collaborative and inclusive engineering culture - The chance to help build the next phase of the **Stensul platform** ## Our Values We look for people who embody our values: - **Lead with Customer Value** – keeping customer value at the center of everything we do - **Garra** – resilience, courage, and confidence in the face of challenges - **Move with Purpose** – acting with intention, staying outcome-oriented, and growing from every miss - **Win as a Team** – succeeding together through trust, collaboration, and respect If you're passionate about building scalable software, mentoring engineers, and shaping the architecture of a growing platform, we’d love to talk.