Lead Software Engineer

ABOUT THE ROLE AND OUR TEAM:

The Knot Worldwide is looking for a highly motivated, full-stack Lead Software Engineer to join the Planning & Marketplace – Thunders team. In this role, you will combine hands-on technical leadership with active contribution, helping the team deliver business value while ensuring strong engineering practices, sound architectural decisions, and high technical quality. You will drive technical direction, mentor engineers, and work on complex user and system problems alongside a talented, collaborative team.

Thunders is a cross-functional Marketplace team responsible for building and evolving core experiences that help couples discover, evaluate, and connect with vendors across The Knot platforms. The team operates in a complex environment that blends legacy systems with modern services, owning critical user journeys and continuously evolving its architecture to improve scalability, reliability, and developer experience.

We work in small, agile teams that move fast, with strong ownership over systems end-to-end, including infrastructure, data flows, APIs, and web applications. As a Lead Engineer, you will be deeply involved in delivery while collaborating closely with Product and Design throughout the full SDLC, balancing short-term execution with long-term technical health.

In the near term, this role will have a strong focus on backend systems, APIs, integrations, and infrastructure, with ongoing initiatives to re-architect and modernize key parts of the Marketplace platform. If you enjoy navigating ambiguity, optimizing data flows, designing scalable and observable services, and leading teams through technical change, we would love to speak with you.

RESPONSIBILITIES: 

• Lead a talented team of full-stack, software engineers
• Will spend at least 30-40% time as an individual contributor directly writing and reviewing code 
• Collaborate closely with distributed teams in the United States
• Foster a culture of quality and ownership 
• Collaborate closely with product managers and other engineering teams at all stages of product development and launch
• Work closely with business stakeholders to deliver value to internal users and business partners
• Act as a liaison between the development team and stakeholders
• Actively participate in the ideation and execution of product roadmap.
• Contribute to the development of codebase (Node,React, AWS)
• Lead and facilitate decision making during technical meetings
• Ensure the continuous improvement of engineering and product processes
• Leverage skills and experience to implement product features that are well architected, tested, and understandable.
• Promote best practices surrounding TDD, continuous integration, code standards, etc.
• Provide mentorship to all members of the team, coaching team members on their personal and career development.

SUCCESSFUL LEAD ENGINEER CANDIDATES HAVE:

• 7+ years of overall engineering experience, with a strong background in building production systems.
• 5+ years of hands-on experience building JavaScript-based frontend applications and/or scalable backend APIs using JavaScript and/or PHP.
  
  
• Solid experience with React and Node.js, including modern frameworks such as Next.js and Nest.js.
  
  
• Proven experience designing, building, and maintaining s