Lead Next.js Engineer & Technical Architect

Vercel; San Francisco, New York (CA, NY); Hybrid; USD 230,000 - 340,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity

Job summary

Vercel is seeking an Engineering Team Lead for the Next.js initiative in San Francisco. You will remain hands-on while guiding a small team, contributing directly to the framework, reviewing code, and steering major technical initiatives.

You will mentor engineers and ensure architectural clarity across rendering, tooling, and performance. You will work with Product, Design, Infrastructure, and UX colleagues to evolve Next.js and related platforms, maintaining a high bar for reliability and

Qualifications

• 8+ years of software engineering experience and hands-on capability.
• Led engineers or small technical teams (team lead, staff engineer, engineering manager).
• Strong judgment across React, framework architecture, and large-scale OSS systems.

Responsibilities

• Build and ship Next.js: write production code, review PRs, debug issues, contribute to the framework.
• Lead major technical initiatives: own projects end-to-end from exploration to production.
• Set technical direction across rendering, caching, routing, build tooling, and runtime behavior.
• Stay close to real problems: investigate performance issues and developer pain points.
• Raise the engineering bar: establish patterns for quality, testing, performance, reliability, and observability.
• Coach engineers through pairing, reviews, feedback, and shared ownership of problems.
• Provide focused people leadership: set expectations, give feedback, support career growth.
• Improve team execution: implement lightweight planning and decision-making to ship consistently.
• Partner across Vercel: align with Product, Design, Infra, and other teams for seamless integration.
• Champion open source: engage with the community while balancing product priorities.
• Help grow the team: participate in recruiting and onboarding new engineers.

Skills

8+ years experience

Team leadership

Technical judgment

Strong communication

Open source mindset

Tools

React

Next.js

Job description

Vercel is seeking an Engineering Team Lead for the Next.js initiative in San Francisco. You will remain hands-on while guiding a small team, contributing directly to the framework, reviewing code, and steering major technical initiatives.

You will mentor engineers and ensure architectural clarity across rendering, tooling, and performance. You will work with Product, Design, Infrastructure, and UX colleagues to evolve Next.js and related platforms, maintaining a high bar for reliability and