Full-Stack Engineering Lead

Headquarters: Remote URL: http://gowalter.co Description Our client is a multi-disciplinary digital product agency obsessed with helping creators build lasting legacies. Since 2020, they've built products at the sweet spot where content meets commerce, empowering established creators and content-led businesses to transform their passion into sustainable success. About the Role We are hiring an Engineering Lead with deep backend expertise and strong fluency across modern web stacks. This role is ideal for someone who thrives on technical challenges, loves building scalable systems, and enjoys collaborating with product, design, and client teams. You'll work both independently and with small teams, depending on the project, write production code, and play a key role in steering technical direction. Core Responsibilities Technical Leadership & Development -Design and build AI-powered tools and automations that streamline internal business processes (HR, Finance, etc.), working directly with stakeholders to identify opportunities -Evaluate where LLM orchestration, chat interfaces, or multimodal AI genuinely adds value versus where standard software engineering is the right answer -Design async processing pipelines, batch workflows, and decoupled service architectures suited to internal tooling at scale -Oversee day-to-day engineering work, keeping the team unblocked and aligned on priorities -Architect scalable backend systems using languages and frameworks such as Pythonand Java. Experience with Kotlin is a plus. -Contribute to frontend work using React and TypeScript as needed -Drive decision-making around performance, scalability, and system design -Write clean, maintainable code and ensure engineering best practices are followed -Lead technical documentation, sprint planning, and ongoing delivery Collaboration & Client Engagement -Partner with product managers and designers to define and scope solutions -Lead client-facing conversations around technical strategy and progress -Present work during demos, milestone check-ins, and roadmap reviews -Balance business needs with technical feasibility in collaborative planning sessions Team Mentorship & Culture -Provide regular feedback and guidance to engineers -Contribute to hiring, onboarding, and leveling processes -Help foster a strong, inclusive engineering culture rooted in transparency and accountability -Identify opportunities to improve our tools, processes, and technical standards Requirements -7+ years of professional engineering experience -English proficiency -Familiarity with AI/LLM integration patterns: orchestration frameworks, MCP, output quality management, and prompt engineering -You can take a vague brief, ask the right clarifying questions, form a plan, and deliver a working system without heavy supervision -You've built real systems end-to-end before and can point to specific examples. Past experience with internal tools or automation platforms is a strong plus. -Experience with access control design (RBAC, zero trust principles), data sensitivity considerations, and API gateway patterns -Experience with Python and Java, including system architecture and performance optimization, is required. Kotlin experience is a plus. -Strong knowledge of React, NextJS, and TypeScript -Backend experience with APIs, databases (SQL/NoSQL), cloud services (AWS, GCP), and distributed systems -Experience with service-oriented architecture, API gateway patterns, and inter-service communication (GraphQL, gRPC, or similar) -You can communicate effectively with both technical and non-technical audiences and are comfortable leading presentations and deep-dive technical discussions -You understand how to compromise on business trade-offs and technical decisions -You can design and communicate robust, scalable technical solutions that our internal and client teams understand and want to work on -You're comfortable dealing with uncertainty and are capable of disambiguating complex scope an