[Hiring] Lead Engineer @CopeCart

Role Description

We are looking for an Agentic Lead Engineer to help shape the next generation of our platform. This is not a role for someone who wants to maintain a traditional Rails product all day. Rails is part of our system, but the center of gravity for this role is our new architecture: TypeScript services, durable workflows, event-driven payments infrastructure, agent-assisted engineering, and production systems where correctness matters.

You will lead from the front: designing systems, reviewing architecture, raising engineering quality, and using AI agents as a serious force multiplier rather than a novelty.

Your tasks

What You’ll Work On:

• Next.js 16, React 19, TypeScript frontend surfaces for creators, buyers, affiliates, and internal operations
• Bun/TypeScript services for payout, affiliate, webhook delivery, contact sync, event schemas, and service orchestration
• Restate durable workflows for money movement, idempotency, retries, and long-running business processes
• Hono, Drizzle, Postgres, Zod, AJV for typed service APIs and strict event contracts
• Supabase/PostgREST for community and gamification surfaces
• Stripe Connect payment and payout flows
• EventBridge/SQS/outbox patterns for reliable domain events
• OpenTelemetry and Aient for trace-driven debugging and production insight
• Playwright, Vitest, Docker Compose E2E stacks for high-confidence delivery
• Terraform/ECS/GitHub Actions for cloud infrastructure and deployment

What Success Looks Like

• You make the system easier to reason about.
• You take full ownership from code to production.
• You are comfortable crossing the boundary between application code, infrastructure, CI/CD, runtime configuration, logs, traces, alerts, and production incidents.
• You will also help us become excellent at agentic software engineering: decomposing work for AI agents, reviewing their output rigorously, enforcing standards, and using automation to move faster without lowering the bar.

Responsibilities

• Lead technical design for new platform capabilities across frontend, services, events, and infrastructure
• Own architecture for critical flows such as checkout, affiliate attribution, payouts, webhook delivery, and creator onboarding
• Review code and designs with a strong eye for correctness, observability, testability, and maintainability
• Guide engineers and AI agents through implementation plans, code review, test strategy, and production hardening
• Improve our engineering system: documentation, CI, E2E reliability, service boundaries, deployment safety, and observability
• Help migrate product capability from legacy CopeCart into the new COPE platform without dragging legacy assumptions forward
• Build a culture where types, tests, traces, and clear ownership are normal

Qualifications

• Strong TypeScript experience across frontend and backend systems
• Deep practical experience with React/Next.js and modern frontend architecture
• Experience designing distributed systems with events, queues, retries, idempotency, and observability
• Comfort working on payments, ledger-like systems, payouts, compliance-heavy flows, or similarly high-correctness domains
• Strong testing instincts: unit, integration, contract, and E2E
• Ability to lead engineers through ambiguity without creating process theater
• Real interest in AI-assisted engineering and agentic workflows
• Pragmatic taste: you can move fast, but you know where shortcuts become debt
• Strong DevOps experience: CI/CD, Docker, cloud infrastructure, runtime configuration, deployment safety, observability, incident debugging, and production ownership
• Experience owning systems end-to-end, from design and implementation through deployment, monitoring, and operational support

Nice To Have

• Restate, Temporal, Durable Objects, or other durable execution systems
• Stripe Connect, marketplace payments, payout systems, tax, invoicing, or reconciliation experience
• OpenTelemetry, trace-based debugging, or production observability experience
• Supabase/PostgREST experience
• Terraform, ECS, Docker, and GitHub Actions experience
• Experience leading small high-output engineering teams

Benefits

• Remote & flexibility: Work from anywhere with flexible working hours based on trust.
• Room for impact: High level of ownership and openness to innovation.
• Access to attractive corporate benefits and a company pension plan.
• Company fitness: Access to fitness and yoga studios, swimming pools, and gyms across Germany and Austria.
• Team events: Opportunities for real exchange, team building, and connection.

Hints for your application

Show us who you are. What do you want to learn with us? Where can you help us move forward? What drives you, and what keeps you going? Share this with us in a short personal message. We read every application individually and take the time to respond to you personally.

CopeCart is an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will be considered without regard to race, color, religion, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, age, or disability.