Next.js Engineering Lead — Hands-On & Open Source

vercel.com; New York, Northern (NY, KY); Hybrid; USD 230,000 - 340,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity

Healthcare

Growth opportunities

Flexible time off

Work-from-home budget

Job summary

Vercel, the platform behind Next.js, is hiring an Engineering Team Lead to build and lead a team focused on Next.js. This hands‑on role requires writing production code while guiding architectural decisions, code reviews, and performance improvements across the framework and its tooling.

You will remain closely connected to engineering execution, review major technical initiatives, and help engineers grow through coaching and constructive feedback.

Qualifications

• You have 8+ years of software engineering experience and remain highly effective as a hands‑on engineer.
• You have led engineers or small technical teams, whether as a team lead, tech lead, staff engineer, engineering manager, or founder.
• You have recent experience writing, reviewing, and shipping production code. You are not looking to step away from engineering execution.
• You have strong technical judgment across React, framework architecture, or the systems behind a large‑scale open source project, including rendering, caching, routing, build tooling, and runtime behavior.
• You can take a complex technical problem, form a clear point of view, write the critical code, and bring other engineers along with you.

Responsibilities

• Build and ship Next.js: Write production code, review pull requests, debug difficult issues, and contribute directly to the framework and its supporting systems.
• Lead major technical initiatives: Take ownership of complex projects from initial exploration through architecture, implementation, rollout, and production follow-through.
• Set technical direction: Make sound architectural decisions across rendering, caching, routing, build systems, runtime behavior, and developer tooling.
• Stay close to real problems: Investigate performance regressions, production failures, and developer pain points. Turn what you learn into practical improvements to the framework.
• Raise the engineering bar: Establish strong patterns for code quality, testing, performance, reliability, observability, and incremental delivery.
• Coach through the work: Help engineers grow through pairing, design reviews, code reviews, technical feedback, and shared ownership of challenging problems.
• Provide focused people leadership: Set clear expectations, give candid feedback, support career development, and help maintain a high-trust and accountable team.

Skills

8+ years software engineering

Team leadership

Strong engineering judgment

React experience

Next.js experience

Open source familiarity

Tools

React

Next.js

Build tooling

Caching/routing knowledge

Runtime behavior

Job description

Vercel, the platform behind Next.js, is hiring an Engineering Team Lead to build and lead a team focused on Next.js. This hands‑on role requires writing production code while guiding architectural decisions, code reviews, and performance improvements across the framework and its tooling.

You will remain closely connected to engineering execution, review major technical initiatives, and help engineers grow through coaching and constructive feedback.