Manager of the Technical Staff - Next.js

The shape of it

In the posting’s own words

We are looking for an Engineering Team Lead to help build and lead a team working on Next.js. This is a hands-on player/coach role for an experienced engineer who wants to remain close to the code while helping a small team do its best work.

What it asks for · 12

• You have 8+ years of software engineering experience and remain highly effective as a hands-on engineer.
• You have led engineers or small technical teams, whether as a team lead, tech lead, staff engineer, engineering manager, or founder.
• You have recent experience writing, reviewing, and shipping production code. You are not looking to step away from engineering execution.
• You have strong technical judgment across React, framework architecture, or the systems behind a large-scale open source project, including rendering, caching, routing, build tooling, and runtime behavior.
• You can take a complex technical problem, form a clear point of view, write the critical code, and bring other engineers along with you.
• You know when to lead from the front and when to create space for someone else to take ownership.
• You have experience building products or infrastructure for developers and understand the quality, performance, stability, and usability standards this audience expects.
• You think in systems and can guide a team toward clean abstractions, consistent framework patterns, and technical decisions that hold up at scale.
• You are comfortable working through ambiguity and solving problems from first principles.
• You balance speed and quality. You favor incremental delivery and real-world feedback while recognizing when foundational infrastructure requires deeper investment.
• You communicate clearly in writing, facilitate productive technical debate, and make decisions when a path forward is needed.
• You use AI tools in your own workflow and have informed opinions about how agentic products should work for developers.

Also a plus

• Experience maintaining or contributing to a major open source project, particularly in the React or Next.js ecosystem.
• Experience with compilers, bundlers, caching, rendering systems, or distributed infrastructure.
• Experience leading a small, senior engineering team while continuing to make substantial individual contributions.
• Experience forming a team or technical direction from zero to one.
• Familiarity with the Next.js codebase, though this is not required.

What the job covers

• Build and ship Next.js: Write production code, review pull requests, debug difficult issues, and contribute directly to the framework and its supporting systems.
• Lead major technical initiatives: Take ownership of complex projects from initial exploration through architecture, implementation, rollout, and production follow-through.
• Set technical direction: Make sound architectural decisions across rendering, caching, routing, build systems, runtime behavior, and developer tooling.
• Stay close to real problems: Investigate performance regressions, production failures, and developer pain points. Turn what you learn into practical improvements to the framework.
• Raise the engineering bar: Establish strong patterns for code quality, testing, performance, reliability, observability, and incremental delivery.
• Coach through the work: Help engineers grow through pairing, design reviews, code reviews, technical feedback, and shared ownership of challenging problems.
• Provide focused people leadership: Set clear expectations, give candid feedback, support career development, and help maintain a high-trust and accountable team.
• Improve team execution: Create lightweight planning and decision-making practices that clarify ownership, reduce unnecessary coordination, and help the team ship consistently.
• Partner across Vercel: Work with Product, Design, Infrastructure, Developer Experience, and other engineering teams so framework changes integrate cleanly across the Vercel platform.
• Champion open source: Work in public, engage thoughtfully with contributors, and balance community needs with the team’s product and technical priorities.
• Help grow the team: Participate in recruiting, assess technical talent, and help new engineers become productive in a complex codebase.

Tools and skills named

Words the posting leans on

• technical13×
• engineers10×
• experience9×
• developer8×
• engineering8×
• framework8×
• build7×
• code7×
• lead7×
• next.js6×
• production6×
• systems6×
• infrastructure5×
• product5×
• complex4×
• decisions4×

Counted from the posting after the mission statement and the legal notices are set aside. The ones near the top are the ones a screener is looking for.

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