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 lead the engineering team behind a large-scale 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 a QA engineer while continuing to write code yourself. You will shape how features are built, translate product requirements into clear technical specifications, make architectural decisions, and take ownership from development through release and production.
You will work closely with the Product Lead, who owns the product vision and priorities, and report directly to the CTO. Together, you will shape not only the technology behind the platform, but also its user experience and evolution.
What we're looking for
General
Product mindset: able to turn business goals into concrete user flows and product decisions, while challenging requirements that do not create real user value
2+ years of technical leadership: experience as a Tech Lead, Team Lead, or hands-on Engineering Manager, including task breakdown, code reviews, mentoring, and 1:1s
5+ years of full-stack engineering experience: building, shipping, and maintaining production web products
Production ownership: comfortable owning releases, incidents, reliability, and data correctness
Remote collaboration: comfortable working in a fully remote environment with overlap across EU time zones
English B2+: confident in written communication, as most day-to-day communication is asynchronous
Technical
UI/UX mindset: able to review existing user flows, identify friction, and implement meaningful improvements without depending on a designer for every change
Strong Laravel: hands-on experience with Eloquent, queues, events, service providers, testing, and production Laravel applications
Vue.js: experience with either Vue 2 or Vue 3. The existing SPA is based on Vue 2.7, Options API, Vuex, and Vue Router, so the ability to work effectively within an existing codebase is more important than framework preference
PostgreSQL: beyond CRUD indexing, query optimization, execution plans, and migrations against live production tables
Strong SQL + analytical databases: practical experience with ClickHouse, BigQuery, Snowflake, or similar technologies
Large-scale data: comfortable working with datasets containing hundreds of millions or billions of rows and understanding the performance implications
Technical documentation: able to write and maintain FRDs, architecture decisions, API contracts, and data models
GCP: experience designing and operating services using Cloud Run, Cloud SQL, GCS, or similar
Docker & CI/CD: hands-on experience with Docker and CI pipelines, preferably GitHub Actions
Automated testing: experience with unit, integration, and E2E testing and a mindset of improving test coverage over time
Production debugging & observability: comfortable working with Sentry, application logs, infrastructure logs, monitoring, and incident investigation
Soft Skills
Thinks in user flows, not just tickets understands who the user is, what they are trying to achieve, and what should happen next
Leads by doing: breaks down work, reviews code, mentors engineers, removes blockers, and makes difficult technical calls when necessary
Strong written communication: can clearly document requirements, architecture decisions, and technical reasoning in English
Analytical mindset: investigates root causes rather than treating symptoms
Strong task and risk management: keeps work transparent, identifies dependencies, and raises risks early
Responsible approach to healthcare data: understands the importance of access control, consent, privacy, and PII
AI & Engineering Automation
AI-assisted development is an integral part of the engineering workflow. We are looking for someone who actively uses AI coding agents rather than treating them as occasional productivity tools.
We expect you to:
Use AI coding agents such as Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, or similar tools on a daily basis
Be comfortable having AI draft a significant portion of production code while personally reviewing and validating the output
Run multiple AI agents in parallel using isolated branches or worktrees
Maintain project-specific AI context using tools such as CLAUDE.md, AGENTS.md, custom commands, and rules
Build AI-powered automations for recurring engineering tasks such as reporting, migrations, release checks, or test generation
Understand when AI-generated output is incorrect, incomplete, or unsafe and know when to reject it
Take full ownership of anything that reaches production, regardless of whether it was written by you or an AI agent
Nice to Have
Experience with design systems or component libraries
Experience with Figma or similar tools for designing and communicating user flows
Experience defining product requirements directly with a Product Manager, founder, or business stakeholder
Background in AdTech, MarTech, or marketing analytics
Experience with healthcare or pharma products, particularly consent and PII handling
Infrastructure as Code experience with Pulumi or Terraform
Experience migrating Vue 2 to Vue 3
TypeScript experience
Apache Druid
BigQuery or ClickHouse performance and cost optimization
Responsibilities
Own the platform experience: make day-to-day UX and user-flow decisions and proactively identify improvements
Partner with Product: contribute to what gets built, challenge assumptions, propose alternatives, and advocate for the user
Lead a small engineering team: 24 developers plus QA, including task planning, code review, mentoring, and participation in hiring
Stay hands-on: design and implement features yourself while distributing work across the team
Own technical design: define data models, APIs, UI flows, testing strategy, and rollout plans
Write and maintain FRDs and keep technical documentation up to date
Work directly with the Product Lead on weekly priorities and delivery planning
Work with large-scale campaign data across PostgreSQL, BigQuery, ClickHouse, and Druid
Own releases and reliability: deployments, monitoring, alerting, incident response, and production support
Improve observability and engineering quality across the platform
Maintain and improve CI/CD and automated testing
Work responsibly with healthcare-professional data, including access, consent, and PII requirements
Report directly to the CTO and help define architecture and engineering standards
Tech Stack
Backend: PHP 8.3, Laravel 12, Redis
Frontend: Vue 2.7, Vuex, Vite
Databases: PostgreSQL, ClickHouse, BigQuery, Apache Druid
Cloud & Infrastructure: GCP, Docker, GitHub Actions
Monitoring: Sentry
Testing: PHPUnit, Cypress
AI: Claude Code and other AI coding agents
What We Offer
Real ownership of a major product area, including its technical direction and user experience
Fully remote work with flexible hours and overlap with EU time zones
Direct access to the CTO and the opportunity to influence architecture and engineering standards
Paid AI tooling, including Claude Code
The opportunity to work with large-scale data, including datasets with up to 1.5 billion rows
Complex real-world integrations with major advertising platforms
A small, experienced engineering team with minimal bureaucracy and fast decision-making
A role where you can influence what gets built, how it is built, and how the product evolves

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.