Platform Engineering Lead

About the Product
We build a marketing data platform for the pharma industry. Our clients are pharmaceutical brands, and the campaigns reach verified healthcare professionals.
The platform enables marketing teams to run campaigns across channels such as Meta, LinkedIn, and programmatic advertising, and to measure campaign performance. The core product is a Laravel + Vue application running on GCP, backed by PostgreSQL and analytical data platforms including ClickHouse and BigQuery.
The team is small, fully remote across EU time zones, and releases continuously.

We are looking for a Lead Platform Engineer to own the technical direction of a web platform used by pharma marketing teams to run and measure their campaigns.

This is a hands-on technical leadership role: you will lead a small team of developers and QA while continuing to write code yourself. You will decide how features should be built, document the approach in an FRD, align it with the CTO, and take it through development, review, release, and production. You will report directly to the CTO and work closely with the Product Lead, who defines what we build and why.
Requirements
General
2+ years leading engineers as a Tech Lead, Team Lead, or hands-on Engineering Manager.
Experience with task breakdown, code review, mentoring, and 1:1s.
5+ years of experience building and shipping web products as a full-stack engineer.
Experience taking ownership of production systems, including releases, incidents, reliability, and data correctness.
Comfortable working in a fully remote environment with overlap across EU time zones.
English B2+; most communication is written and asynchronous.
Technical
Strong hands-on experience with Laravel/PHP, including Eloquent, queues, events, service providers, and testing.
Experience with Vue.js and ability to work effectively with an existing frontend codebase.
Strong PostgreSQL skills beyond CRUD: indexing, query plans, performance optimization, and production migrations.
Strong SQL skills and hands-on experience with analytical databases such as ClickHouse, BigQuery, Snowflake, or similar.
Experience working with large-scale datasets and performance-sensitive applications.
Experience designing APIs, data models, and application architecture.
Experience writing FRDs and technical documentation, including architecture decisions, API contracts, and data models.
GCP experience at the service-design level, ideally with Cloud Run, Cloud SQL, and GCS.
Hands-on experience with Docker and CI/CD, preferably GitHub Actions.
Strong automated testing mindset and experience with tools such as PHPUnit and Cypress.
Experience debugging production issues using logs, monitoring, and tools such as Sentry.
Understanding of reliability, observability, security, and production incident management.
Soft Skills
You lead through action: break down work, review code, unblock engineers, mentor, and make technical decisions.
Strong written communication skills in English, especially for FRDs, technical decisions, and code reviews.
Analytical and systematic approach to problem-solving; you look for the root cause before proposing a fix.
Strong task and priority management; you identify and communicate risks early.
Comfortable saying no or challenging an approach when there is a strong technical reason.
Careful and responsible approach to sensitive data, including access control, consent, and PII.
AI Baseline
AI-assisted development is a core part of how we work. From day one, we expect:
Daily use of AI coding agents such as Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, or similar — required.
50%+ of shipped code may be drafted by AI agents, with the engineer reviewing and owning the final result.
Ability to run 2–4 AI agents in parallel using isolated branches or worktrees.
Experience maintaining project-level AI context such as CLAUDE.md, AGENTS.md, custom commands, or rules — at least 1 self-created artifact.
Ability to automate at least 1 recurring engineering routine per month using AI agents, such as reports, migrations, release checks, or test generation.
Strong understanding of AI failure modes and the ability to reject or completely rewrite AI-generated output when necessary.
You remain fully accountable for anything that reaches production.
Nice to Have
Experience in ad-tech, marketing analytics, or campaign platforms.
Understanding of impressions, clicks, attribution windows, audience matching, and campaign measurement.
Experience in healthcare or pharma, particularly around consent and PII.
Infrastructure-as-code experience with Pulumi or Terraform.
Experience migrating Vue 2 to Vue 3.
TypeScript experience.
Apache Druid experience.
Experience tuning BigQuery or ClickHouse for cost and performance.
Experience introducing AI agents, automation, or AI-driven engineering workflows into a development team.
Responsibilities
Lead a small team of 2–4 developers plus QA, including task breakdown, code review, mentoring, and input into hiring.
Stay hands-on and continue writing production code yourself.
Design how features should be implemented across the data model, API, UI, tests, and rollout.
Write FRDs and keep technical documentation, architecture decisions, API contracts, and data models up to date.
Work directly with the Product Lead to translate weekly priorities into technical solutions.
Work with large campaign datasets across PostgreSQL, BigQuery, ClickHouse, and Druid.
Own application performance and help keep data-heavy dashboards responsive.
Own releases, reliability, monitoring, alerting, and incident response.
Take responsibility for production deployments and the systems you put into production.
Work with healthcare-professional data according to access, consent, and PII requirements.
Define and improve engineering standards, architecture, testing, and observability.
Report directly to the CTO and collaborate on architecture and technical standards.
Tech Stack
PHP 8.3 · Laravel 12 · Vue 2.7 · Vuex · Vite · PostgreSQL · Redis · ClickHouse · BigQuery · Apache Druid · GCP · Docker · GitHub Actions · Sentry · PHPUnit · Cypress · Claude Code
What We Offer
Fully remote work with flexible hours and overlap with EU time zones.
Direct access to the CTO and real influence over technical decisions.
A role where you bring architecture proposals and technical standards rather than simply receiving pre-defined tickets.
Paid AI tooling, including Claude Code.
Real-world data and scale, including datasets with up to 1.5 billion rows.
Complex integrations and production challenges that require engineering judgment rather than textbook solutions.
A small team with minimal bureaucracy and fast decision-making.

Interview Process
Intro Call — 30 min: expectations and mutual fit.
Technical Interview — 90 min: architecture, data modelling, production failure modes, and AI-assisted development.
Product Lead Interview — 45 min: collaboration, product thinking, and ways of working.