Staff Engineer & Engineering Lead at Distro

ABOUT DISTRO Distro (distro.io) is a modern hiring and recruitment platform built to give staffing teams and employers a faster, smarter way to source, evaluate, and place talent. Our platform is used across enterprise and mid-market accounts to manage high-volume hiring workflows. We are a product-led, engineering-driven team building on PHP Laravel and React. THE ROLE We are looking for a Staff Engineer and Engineering Lead to own the technical direction and day-to-day organization of the Distro engineering team. This is primarily a leadership role. You will be responsible for how the team is structured, how work gets planned and prioritized, how engineers grow, and how technical decisions get made. The platform runs on AWS and is built on PHP Laravel and React — but your job is less about writing that code and more about ensuring the people who do are set up to do it well. You will serve as the connective tissue between product leadership and the engineering team — translating roadmap priorities into organized, executable engineering work, establishing standards and processes, and holding the bar for technical quality across the organization. Hands-on contributions are expected and welcomed, but they are secondary to your role as a leader, mentor, and organizer. The right person for this role has strong opinions about how engineering teams should operate, a track record of developing other engineers, and the technical depth to earn credibility on AWS infrastructure, system design, and integrations — even when they are not the one doing the implementation. WHAT YOU WILL DO Team Leadership & Organization • Own the structure and organization of the engineering team — how work is scoped, assigned, tracked, and delivered • Lead sprint planning, backlog grooming, and technical prioritization in partnership with product leadership • Establish and enforce engineering processes: code review standards, release practices, incident response, and documentation habits • Mentor and develop engineers at all levels through regular 1:1s, structured feedback, and deliberate growth planning • Identify gaps in team capability or process and drive concrete improvements • Serve as the primary technical point of contact for product, operations, and leadership stakeholders • Drive clarity on technical decisions — documenting tradeoffs, aligning the team, and ensuring follow-through • Drive AI adoption and usage across the team for effeciency and growth Technical Direction • Own architectural decisions for AWS infrastructure, including ECS, CloudFormation, Aurora RDS, EC2, Lambda, and networking • Review and approve significant technical work; set the standard for what good looks like • Lead evaluation and integration of third-party services including AI APIs (OpenAI) and platform services (RChilli, ATS integrations) • Contribute hands-on when needed — particularly in infrastructure, system design, and complex integration work — but this is not primarily a coding role • Identify and drive resolution of systemic performance, reliability, or scalability issues WHAT WE ARE LOOKING FOR Leadership & Organization (Required) • Demonstrated experience leading an engineering team — owning process, delivery, and people development • Track record of mentoring and growing engineers at different levels • Strong organizational instincts: you know how to bring structure to ambiguous situations without creating bureaucracy • Experience working directly with product and business stakeholders to translate priorities into engineering plans • Excellent written and verbal communication in English; this is a remote, async-heavy environment and clarity of communication is essential • Comfortable operating with significant autonomy and accountability Technical Depth (Required) • 8+ years of engineering experience, with at least 2-3 years in a staff, principal, or technical lead capacity • Sufficient depth in PHP/Laravel and React to review work, guide decisions, and understand tradeoffs — hands-on production experience preferred • Experience designing, building, and maintaining REST APIs and third-party integrations • Working knowledge of SQL for query review, schema decisions, and performance analysis • Strong written communication skills in English; this is a remote, async-heavy environment • Real world usage of AI workflows in development, such as Cursor, Claude Code, Code Rabbit, etc. AWS & Infrastructure (Primary Focus) • Hands-on production experience with AWS ECS (container orchestration, task definitions, service configuration, capacity providers) • Strong working knowledge of AWS CloudFormation for infrastructure as code, including writing and maintaining stacks and change sets • Experience with Aurora RDS, including cluster configuration, parameter groups, read replicas, and performance tuning • Proficiency with EC2, including instance sizing, AMIs, launch templates, auto-scaling groups, and placement strategies • Solid understanding of AWS networking: VPCs, subnets, security groups, NAT gateways, load balancers (ALB/NLB), and Route 53 • Experience with AWS Lambda for event-driven and scheduled workloads • Familiarity with IAM, roles, and least-privilege access patterns across AWS services API & Third-Party Integrations • Experience integrating with OpenAI APIs (completions, embeddings, or assistants) in a production environment • Familiarity with resume parsing services such as RChilli or similar document processing APIs • General experience connecting and maintaining integrations with external SaaS APIs in a production platform Nice to Have • Experience in the HR tech, recruiting, or workforce management space • Familiarity with ATS systems, job board integrations (Indeed, LinkedIn, ZipRecruiter, etc.), or HRIS platforms • Experience with BI tooling such as Retool, Metabase, or similar • QA experience or familiarity with QA processes, including test strategy, automated testing frameworks, and quality gates — experience managing or working alongside a QA function is a plus HOW WE WORK • Fully remote; you manage your own schedule and environment • Engineering culture that values code quality, pragmatism, and clear communication • You will interface directly with product and engineering leadership - this is a flat, fast-moving team • Async-first communication with English as the working language • PJ engagement structure; you are responsible for your own tax and compliance obligations in Brazil #DISTRO #LI-PROMOTED #LI-Remote